Gordon Parks:
Camera as Weapon

Gordon Parks was born in 1912 into a family of sharecroppers in Fort Scott, Kansas. His mother died when he was 15; he was sent to live with a sister in St. Paul, Minnesota, was thrown out by his brother-in-law, and spent his teens working as a busboy, piano player, and floorwalker — essentially homeless in Minneapolis during the Depression. He bought a secondhand Voigtländer camera at a Seattle pawnshop in 1938 after seeing photographs of migrant farmworkers in a magazine he found on a train. He had never taken a photograph. He taught himself.

By 1942, he had won a fellowship from the Farm Security Administration — the New Deal agency that had employed Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Ben Shahn to document American poverty. His supervisor was Roy Stryker, who sent Parks on an assignment in Washington, D.C., and then, when Parks encountered segregation at every turn — refused service in a restaurant, excluded from a movie theater — told him to photograph the janitor in the FSA building instead. Parks photographed Ella Watson — a Black government cleaner — in front of an American flag, holding a mop and a broom. He called it American Gothic. It remains one of the most devastating images in American photographic history.

The photograph of Ella Watson was a direct citation of Grant Wood's 1930 painting American Gothic — the iconic image of white rural America. Parks replaced Wood's white Iowa farmer couple with a Black government cleaner. The flag behind her was not ironic. It was accusatory. Parks had been a photographer for less than four years. He had already produced the most politically resonant photograph in American government documentary history.

In 1948, Gordon Parks became the first Black photographer on the staff of Life magazine — at the time, the most widely read picture publication in the world, with a weekly circulation of 8 million. The position was unprecedented. It was also logistically impossible in a segregated America: Parks could not stay in the same hotels as his colleagues, could not eat in the same restaurants, could not be guaranteed admission to any venue he was sent to photograph. He navigated this through a combination of personal authority, persistence, and the political cover of a publication that powerful people did not want to offend.

His 1948 photo essay on Red Jackson, a teenage gang member in Harlem, was a landmark of social documentary photography — intimate, specific, morally serious. His 1961 essay on Flavio da Silva, a desperately poor child in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, moved 20,000 Americans to write to Life with donations. His extended documentation of the Civil Rights Movement — Birmingham, Selma, the March on Washington — put the violence of white supremacy in front of 8 million weekly readers who might otherwise have never seen it. Parks understood what newspapers and television were just learning: photographs change the political calculation. You cannot argue with an image of a child being hit by a fire hose.

Parks also photographed fashion, sports, and celebrity — Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Stokely Carmichael, Ingrid Bergman. His range was deliberate: he refused to be confined to a "Black photographer" beat. He insisted on his right to photograph everything — and in doing so, demonstrated that Black photographers could work at the highest professional level across every subject. The magazines that had not hired Black photographers had not done so because Black photographers were not capable. Parks proved that argument was wrong every week for 24 years.

In 1963, Gordon Parks published The Learning Tree — a semi-autobiographical novel about growing up Black in Kansas in the 1920s. It was taught in schools and became a bestseller. Warner Bros. offered to adapt it for film. Parks insisted on directing, producing, and writing the screenplay himself — conditions no Black filmmaker had ever successfully imposed on a Hollywood studio. Warner Bros. agreed. In 1969, The Learning Tree became the first major Hollywood studio film directed by a Black American.

Parks also composed the film's score. He had been a semi-professional musician before he was a photographer; he had written a piano sonata that was performed at Carnegie Hall. The film was personal in ways that studio productions rarely are: it documented the specific texture of rural Black Kansas life, its pleasures and terrors, in a manner that had no precedent in commercial Hollywood cinema. Black characters in Hollywood films had, for generations, been servants, criminals, comic relief, or symbols. The Learning Tree was the first major Hollywood film to treat a Black protagonist as a fully human being with an interior life worth an entire film's attention.

The film was selected in 1989 for the Library of Congress's first National Film Registry — among the first 25 films ever deemed culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant enough to be preserved. It was placed on that list alongside Citizen Kane, Casablanca, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The first major Hollywood film directed by a Black man was considered among the most important American films ever made. Hollywood had waited until 1969 to make one.

In 1971, Gordon Parks directed Shaft — the story of a Black private detective navigating Harlem's criminal and corporate power structures. The film cost $1.1 million to make and grossed $12 million. It saved MGM from bankruptcy. Richard Roundtree played John Shaft — a Black protagonist who was sexually confident, physically powerful, professionally competent, and entirely without the apologetic deference that Hollywood had, for decades, required of Black male characters. Isaac Hayes wrote and performed the soundtrack, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

Shaft launched the Blaxploitation era — a wave of films with Black casts, Black settings, Black cultural aesthetics — that produced, between 1971 and 1975, more Black-led Hollywood films than the previous four decades combined. The commercial success was real: the films were profitable because Black audiences, who had been ignored by Hollywood for generations, showed up in enormous numbers for films that reflected their experience. Hollywood's interest in Black cinema was financial, not moral — but the financial interest produced films, and films produced representation, and representation produced a generation of Black filmmakers, actors, and audiences who understood the medium as theirs to claim.

The Blaxploitation films were criticized, with some justification, for perpetuating stereotypes about Black criminality and hypersexuality. Parks himself was ambivalent about what Shaft had unleashed. But the alternative — no Black-led films at all — was what had existed before. The question was not whether these films were perfect. The question was whether Black people had the right to appear in commercial cinema as protagonists. Parks forced the answer to be yes.

Gordon Parks died in 2006 at age 93. He had been a sharecropper's son, a teenage homeless youth during the Depression, a self-taught photographer who became the most important Black photojournalist in American history, a filmmaker who broke open Hollywood, a novelist, a poet, a composer. He had done all of this in a country that had, at the time of his birth, relegated Black people to legal subordination and physical danger. He chose, every time, to make something rather than destroy something — to document rather than be destroyed by what he documented.

His title for his first autobiography — A Choice of Weapons — named the philosophy. The camera, the pen, the musical score: these were weapons against the forces that had killed his friends, denied his existence, and tried to limit his world to the dimensions of a Kansas sharecropper's field. The weapons worked. His photographs are in the collections of every major American museum. His films changed the economics of Hollywood. His autobiography is in high school curricula across the country. The boy who was thrown out by his brother-in-law at 15 made work that will outlast every institution that tried to exclude him.

The Gordon Parks Foundation, established in 2006, continues to support young photographers and artists through fellowships and grants. The Foundation's offices are in New York City. Fort Scott, Kansas — where Parks was born — has a museum named for him. He came from almost nothing, in a place that did not want him to succeed, and made himself into one of the central figures of American cultural history. The chain of that determination runs through every Black artist who came after him and knew what was possible.