Gordon Parks

Gordon Parks bought his first camera in a pawnshop and became the first black photographer on the FSA payroll, the first on the staff of Life, and the first to direct a major Hollywood film. He was the youngest of fifteen children of a Kansas farmer, was homeless at sixteen after his mother died, and worked as a busboy, a porter and a semi-professional basketball player before seeing FSA photographs in a magazine and deciding that a camera could be a weapon against poverty and racism - his phrase, and the title of his memoir. Roy Stryker hired him in 1942 and, on his first day, sent him out into Washington to be refused service at a department store, a cinema and a restaurant; the picture he made that evening, of the cleaner Ella Watson standing with a broom and a mop before the American flag, is called American Gothic and is the best-known thing he did. He worked for Life for two decades on Harlem gang life, segregation in the South, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali and the Black Panthers, usually living with his subjects first. He then directed The Learning Tree in 1969 from his own novel, and Shaft in 1971, which made money on a scale that opened studio doors for black directors. He also composed music, wrote poetry and published a ballet about Martin Luther King. Ella Watson kept working as a cleaner and Parks photographed her family over several weeks afterwards rather than leaving with the one frame. He received the National Medal of Arts in 1988. The Gordon Parks Foundation now funds photographers directly. He said the camera was his choice of weapon and that he had picked it because he could not afford another.

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