Gordon Parks: a lion in winter: on living life as one "superb feast"

I have always considered myself a spiritual daughter of Gordon Parks; and I have viewed him as a mentor all of my professional life. So I was delighted and thrilled to have the opportunity to sit with him and reminisce about his illustrious career and to discuss the upcoming publication of his books A Hungry Heart: A Memoir and Eyes With Winged Thoughts: Poetry and Images, both published by Atria Books in November. This fall, Harlem Moon/Broadway Classic is reissuing his 1990 autobiography Voices in the Mirror, with a new Introduction.

Parks's Manhattan apartment is a wonderful space: the windows face the East River and the piano is covered with sheet music, family photographs and books. I marveled at his collection of photographs and books. The bookcases are filled with volumes, ranging from history books to novels. Art books are arranged around the room on the carpeted floor, on shelves of bookcases and on tables. The walls are covered with original artworks and family snapshots, and I admired the combination of placing value on one's family photographs alongside the masterful artworks made by well-known artists, including his own works.

Parks entered the living room wearing a royal blue and burgundy-colored silk smoking jacket; a baseball cap covering his distinguished white hair. I smiled. He had a bounce to his step and I loved it. He greeted me with a hug and kiss and informed me that he was not feeling well. But within a few minutes in our conversation, he perked up. He even said that he was surprised at his newfound energy.

Born on November 30, 1912, in Fort Scott, Kansas, Gordon Parks has spent some seven decades observing, writing, documenting, photographing and interpreting his life experiences. He is a man who is committed to his work. In his memoir, he recalls the lessons his father taught him, mere months before his fifteenth birthday and the death of his mother.

"Your heart will tell your feet which roads to take," his father said. "There'll be signposts along the way giving out directions. You'll have the right to question them, but don't ignore them. Each one is meant for something."

In my view, his father was encouraging him to dream. "Beneath the light of many moons I've still heeded Poppa's advice," Parks notes in A Hungry Heart. "I'm still smiling, still recalling his words from a long way off. Their meaning has never stopped growing.... Despite the waves of anguish that threaten me at times, it never gives up on me. It is imbedded like a jewel in my hungry heart."

Best known as a photographer, Parks has also written a number of books and articles, scored concertos, directed films and played piano on the concert stage. Guided by his father's advice, he has transformed his own life and continues to affect the lives of his countless admirers.

A Life of Firsts

In A Hungry Heart and Eyes With Winged Thoughts, Parks reveals a life story that is both intensely personal and deeply influenced by the outside world. Though several "firsts" are listed on his biography--first black photographer hired by the Farm Security Administration (1941), first black photographer for Life (1948), first black director to make a movie for a major studio (The Learning Tree, 1969) etc.--he does not see himself as a pioneer.

As he writes in a poem titled "Momma" in Eyes With Winged Thoughts, he's never supported "blaming your skin's blackness for tumbling you downward." By refusing to be defined by the racism of the day, Parks was free to explore his genius.

His art and writings were informed by the political climate of America in the 1960s. He remembers those years affectionately as he describes culling photographs for his 1997 retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery in Half Past Autumn. (I remember looking through piles of photographs with the cocurator Philip Brookman as we talked about the stories that we really were too young to know about.)

"The photographs we chose to represent my years of journalistic endeavors were crammed with things that had been far beyond my reach," Parks writes. "I had been given assignments I had never expected to earn. Some proved to be as different as silk and iron. Once, crime and fashion was served to me on the same day. The color of a Dior gown I photographed one afternoon turned out to be the same color as the blood of a murdered gang member I had photographed earlier that morning up in Harlem."

In the early 1960s, I sat in my mom's beauty shop reading Life magazine and discovered the photographs of Gordon Parks. I was 12, but I still remember vividly the affect those visual stories had on my life (which also would be shaped by the visual image). Recently, I thought about why his work had inspired my decision to become a photographer. It is because, to Parks, life is a banquet: "What a superb feast it is! The sweetness of recognition and success, the bitterness of poverty, hunger, and bigotry overlying the rituals of existence: marriage, birth, work, season with pain and joy, and most of all--love."

It is inspiring to see that at the age of 93 Parks continues to share his dreams and assess his life. The poetic title Eyes With Winged Thoughts conjures up imagery of a visionary with wings, flying through life experiences, documenting everything he passed by. The two recent titles are clearly extensions of his previously published works, but he interprets in a fresh way his relationship with Malcolm X and meeting Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver. In both books, he uses his memories to show us his creative abilities. He recalls the details of his early years with exhilarating candor, talking about his wives, children and grandchildren; and his friendships with artists at the Southside Community Art Center in Chicago, where he met Charles White, Gwendolyn Brooks and Elizabeth Catlett. He also discusses his autobiographical novel The Learning Tree (1963), which was inspired by his own struggles. Parks considers the book his most significant accomplishment because before then "I didn't know that I could write."

Still, after the book was published, he was astonished to receive a call from filmmaker John Cassavetes, who said, "I just read The Learning Tree last night. How would you like to come to Hollywood and direct it?" Parks responded that no black director had worked in a major studio, but before the conversation ended Cassavetes had asked him to work for Warner Brothers. Parks soon confirmed how race works in Hollywood. When he arrived a few days later, he was asked to write the screenplay, direct and produce the film and write the music. He pointedly said to the studio executives, "you will fix [it] so that black people would never come back to Hollywood."

The Best of Life

When asked, Parks initially finds it difficult to decide which of his Life assignments made the greatest social impact and which one he holds closest to his heart. But then he recalls two memorable assignments that created a stir among the readers of the magazine, where he worked from 1948 to the late '60s. In 1961, he published an essay about the Brazilian slum (or favela) of Catacumba, located on a desolate mountainside outside of Rio de Janeiro. He met and photographed the da Silva family and was particularly moved by the condition of their 12-year-old son, Flavio, who was dying from tuberculosis. Flavio lived with his parents, brothers and sisters in a one-room shack.

"What Flavio cared most about," says Parks, "was that his younger brothers and sisters were taken care of. It was very noble of him.... I definitely learned more from Flavio about character than Flavio learned from me."

Life readers sent hundreds of letters of support, as well as approximately $30,000 to bring Flavio to America and pay for his medical care. "I went back to Brazil and the doctors told me that Flavio would die on my hands if I took him to America," he says. "I took him anyway and after living here for two years, he was cured."

When the boy returned to Brazil, Parks used some of the donations to buy Flavio's father a new truck, and Life donated $25,000 to help the family buy a new home. In 2000, Parks visited Flavio, who has two young sons, a daughter and a grandchild.

Vestiges of a Shipwreck

Parks also photographed an American family named the Fontenelles. Looking back on that assignment was particularly difficult for him. The troubles of the impoverished Norman and Bessie and their children never ceased, even after the essay was published. With sadness, he talks about how the Long Island house Life purchased for the family was destroyed by an accidental fire started by Norman Fontenelle. "Disaster kept visiting what was left of the Fontenelles" he writes in A Hungry Heart.

"Sometimes I question my reasons for having ever touched the Fontenelles. I've been told that their story helped other black families escape a similar existence. Perhaps that's so, but it doesn't alter my feelings about that family's misfortunes or those untimely deaths they met. The painful memories are still there, still rumbling through me like the vestiges of a shipwreck."

Yet there was hope in Parks's voice and a smile on his face as he described Bessie and Norman's youngest son, Richard, who survived and named his son Gordon.

What I've learned from Gordon Parks is that we cannot merely accept, but must try to understand the reasons for the conditions of his subjects.

It is not surprising that Gordon Parks's new memoir is titled A Hungry Heart. His self-conscious text informs us of his quest. "Driven by an insatiable hunger," he writes, "I still search for those things that inspire me--beautiful imagery, music, and literature."

Books by Gordon Parks

A Choice of Weapons Minnesota Historical Society Press October 1986, $14.95, ISBN 0-873-51202-2

An inspiring autobiography of the award-winning photographer and artist.

Eyes With Winged Thoughts: Poetry and Images Atria Books, November 2005 $27.95, ISBN 0-743-27962-X

A new collection of works.

Glimpses Toward Infinity Little, Brown & Company, September 1996, ISBN 0-790-97966-7

A volume of abstract images that appear almost surreal.

Half Past Autumn: A Retrospective Bulfinch Press, October 1997 $65, ISBN 0-821-22298-8

Awe-inspiring photographs that captures the lives of the urban poor, in Harlem, Brazil and the South.

A Hungry Heart: A Memoir Atria Books, November 2005 $26, ISBN 0-743-26902-0

The Learning Tree Fawcett (reprint), June 1987 $6.99, ISBN 0-449-21504-0 A classic novel based on the author's growing up in Kansas.

A Star for Noon: An Homage to Women in Images, Poetry and Music Bulfinch Press, October 2000 $50, ISBN 0-821-22685-1

Images, poems and a CD created on the theme of love.

The Sun Stalker: A Novel Based on the Life of Joseph Mallord William Turner Rudd Finn Press, Inc., February 2003 $29.95, ISBN 0-964-09528-9

Inspired by the genius of the British artist.

Books by Deborah Willis

Black: A Celebration of a Culture Hylas Publishing, December 2003, $35, ISBN 1-592-58051-3

The Black Female Body: A Photographic History Temple University Press, January 2002 $60, ISBN 1-566-39928-9

Family, History and Memory: Recording African-American Life Hylas Publishing, January 2005, $24.95, ISBN 1-592-58086-6

Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography New Press, May 1996, $14, ISBN 1-565-84106-9

Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present W.W. Norton & Co., June 2000, $50, ISBN 0-393-04880-2

A Small Nation of People: W.E.B. Du Bois and African American Portraits Amistad/HarperCollins, October 2003, $24.95, ISBN 0-060-52342-5

Deborah Willis, Ph.D. is professor of photography and imaging, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.

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