.: R.I.P. Gordon Parks

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

R.I.P. Gordon Parks

In march of 1999 I was fortunate to go see "Half Past Autumn: The Art of Gordon Parks" at the Detroit Institute of Arts.
I was struck by his prolific output as an artist. A photographer, artist, composer, film maker and writer. his years as a photographer intrested me the most as he was one of the only black photographers of the day and as such captured and documented the human condition of his day. I could connect with that journey as I feel I am much on the same one.
Gordon Parks died Tuesday of cancer at the age of 93. The world has lost so many important photographers in the past few years but Gordon Parks was one of a kind... If ones life is meant to leave a mark or make a difference then Gordon has done so.

Gordon Parks was born in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912, the youngest of 15 children. His mother died when he was 16. He then lived with his sister in St. Paul, Minnesota for a while before he dropped out of high school. His jobs were varied, including as a pianist with an otherwise all-white band and with the Civilian Conservation Corps. At the age of 25, Parks purchased a used camera from a pawn shop and became a fashion and personality photographer in Chicago. His first substantial work came when he began work in 1942 as a documentary photographer with the Farm Security Administration, an agency created to call attention to and produce a historical record of social and cultural conditions across the country. At the FSA, Parks worked as a trainee under Roy Stryker.

The Washington Post wrote: "During this period, he took what became one of his signature photographs, a picture of Ella Watson, a cleaning woman who worked in the agency's building. He positioned Watson in front of an American flag, a broom in one hand and a mop in the other. He named the picture American Gothic, Washington, D.C. The photograph captured his style of focusing on one particular person to illustrate a broad social theme."

This was one of my most favorite images... When I look at this image It gives me a special kind of hope that one day the dream of King and other leaders of the 60's will come true. More importantly it reminds me that racial bias is taught and that sometimes we can learn allot from children.

After FSA closed, Parks became the first black photographer in the Office of War Information. Parks went on to work for Vogue and Life magazines.

He stayed with Life from 1948 to 1968, becoming known for his photo essays on the effects of poverty and the civil rights movement. Parks' 1961 photo essay on an impoverished Brazilian boy named Flavio, published in Life, inspired donations that were credited with saving the boy's life, and to help the family build a house.

In 1969, Parks become Hollywood's first major black director with his film The Learning Tree, based on his 1963 autobiographical novel. Parks also composed the film's score.

Shaft, Parks' 1971 detective film starring Richard Roundtree, became a major hit and spawned a series of films. Parks directed a sequel, Shaft's Big Score, in 1972.
Parks' writing accomplishments included novels, poetry, autobiography, and non-fiction including photographic instructional manuals and filmmaking books. A self-taught pianist, Parks composed Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1953) and Tree Symphony (1967). In 1989, he composed and choreographed "Martin," a ballet dedicated to civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. Parks' also performed as a jazz pianist and as a campaigner for civil rights. He was the subject of film and print profiles, notably "Half Past Autumn" in 2000. Parks' late son, Gordon Parks, Jr., directed films including Superfly.

Images of Harlem and the portrait of Langston Hughes are among my personal favorites.

The Learning Tree was placed on the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1989, among the first films so honored. Parks is remembered for his activism, filmmaking, photography, and writings. He was the first African American to work at Life magazine, and the first to write, direct, and score a Hollywood film.
In 1997, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. mounted a career retrospective on Parks, Half Past Autumn: The Art of Gordon Parks.

"Freedom", Parks said, was the theme of all of his work: "Not allowing anyone to set boundaries, cutting loose the imagination and then making the new horizons."

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The Dance Through Life Project

Photograph project dedicated to capture the Art of Dance within the parameters of everyday life. The project hopes to capture the innate relationships between dance and everyday life. Images of dance performed in non-traditional locales hopefully demystifying dance as being inaccessible and drawing the obvious metaphor that while all can not express life with such movement and physicality, we all love with our own signature grace. Therefore we all dance.

Order your copy today by clicking on the books above!

Through New Eyes: The Photography of Christopher Cushman by Rinaldo Walcott

The Black male body remains an enigma despite its over representation in the public sphere. The dominance of hip hop culture globally, driven in part, but not exclusively by the innovative sounds of rap music have made Black men a standard by which Black men and other men judge themselves in contemporary culture. However, there is a paradox, because despite the prevalence of hip-hop’s popular global impact, Black men are also still some of the most despised men in Western culture. Stereotypes of criminality, disease and danger still abound and organize Black men’s lives, even within hip hop culture. Thus representations of Black men tend to be much more restricted, than open-ended. The struggle to bring Black men into complex open-ended representations has been an on-going historical struggle. One of the most potent forms of representation in the last one hundred and fifty years has been the photograph. Photography has offered the promise to represent the real in a manner that has both seduce its viewers and baffled them with its artifice. Black male photographic representations in the last half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first have promised to rescue Black men from the confines of mis-representation and stereotype. One of the most difficult and complicated circumstances of Black male representations has been in the realm of representing their sexuality. Black men’s sexuality is still over-burdened by a perceived threat and danger, especially now in the hyped-up era of the downlow. Then along comes Cushman. I first hear of Christopher Cushman’s photography from my boyfriend. He told me of a guy who was taking photographs of black nudes based upon how they wanted themselves to be seen, not how he posed them as his models. When I met Cushman he confirmed that he did indeed work from the models’ suggested posed and not impose his own. The idea is a great one because it allows the models agency in choosing what they believe to be an adequate representation of who they are. While it is now true that in contemporary culture subjects have learned to play for the camera, offering us artifice on command, this artifice can be understood as exposing inner senses of self and being. Cushman’s photography captures and reveals those inner desires. Look at me, many of the models seems to say. But look at me anew, is also what they seem to project and insist on. Cushman’s eye lavishes these Black male bodies with glimmers of light revealing their nuance personalities. While most of the men are naked their individuality comes clearly through. And yet, their eyes too reveal that they belong to a community, a family and possess desires, fantasies and needs. In these photographs, as viewers we are given new eyes to see beyond our inner voyeur. Cushman channels, Robert Mapplethorpe, Rotimi Fani-Kayode and many other artists, commercial and amateur photographers who seek to rescue the Black male body from the disastrous depths of mis-representation, and who almost always fall short. The conversations that his models create between his work and others whether unconscious or not reveal the profound influence of the image in our time. However, in Cushman’s eyes the Black male body is not being rescued, instead it stands on a self-made pedestal, not arrogantly announcing its existence but coolly (its signature) singing its own praisesong as swathes of light and behind the camera love washes over it. In each moment a small but significant revelation is made. Each revelation offers us the opportunity of an Epiphany – to think a thought about a Black man that we have not thought before. Professor Rinaldo Walcott is a cultural critic and Canada Research Chair of Social Justice and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto. He lives and writes in Toronto.

FIERCE! Being Black, Being Gay in America

"What Chris has done with this important collection of images, Fierce: Being Black, Being Gay in America, A Photographic Essay, is to seek, lift, and affirm the identity and visibility of men-who love-men and express it in many ways. His photographs display Midwest American men from the outlandish and flamboyant, to the subdued and subtle. You’d think these were “ladies who lunch;” muscular men dressed for the “Park” in lace, and floppy hats to give effect for all to see. Brothers connecting in places we know are safe, such as our nightclubs, the discos, and special events targeting our interests.

The importance of Fierce is paramount: all men are created equal, and share a space on earth. These portraits of men have to be recognized as God’s beauty and not His damnation. Time will thank those who were strong and dared enough to express themselves for all to see and appreciate in a manner that’s loving and creative. Time will also thank us for not living in a paranoid state of mind, and afraid of our own shadows. Remember, this cluster of work isn’t Robert Mappelthope’s approach to black imagery, but the approach of documenting men as they wanted to be seen: with and without sexual stimulation, for shock value."

Curtis A. Lipscomb
Executive Director Kick – The Agency for L-G-B-T African-Americans
Detroit Michigan / 2005
www.e-kick.com