[Mb-civic] A Conscience With a Lens (Gordon Parks Appreciation) - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

A Conscience With a Lens
Gordon Parks Turned Photographs Into Poetry

By Wil Haygood
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 9, 2006; C01

Those who remember say that seeing Gordon Parks on the streets of 
Manhattan in the early 1950s was a beautiful thing.

His hair was wavy and black and swept back. Sometimes he wore an ascot. 
Maybe the night before he had been up in Harlem, hanging out with 
Langston Hughes or Jimmy Baldwin at Small's Paradise, having a bit to 
drink, talking about his photographs of Paris. Parks was always going or 
coming. And he always had his cameras.

"I'd see him on downtown street corners, always with a camera," says 
Evelyn Cunningham, a journalist who befriended Parks in the 1950s. "He'd 
be testing the light."

Cunningham says she and others always marveled at how Parks kept up such 
a stylish persona -- and his reputation as a major photographer.

He held dinner parties and soirees, wore long coats in the rain, and 
boxed up his cameras in lovely suitcases to travel.

He had a thing for fresh flowers.

He was not a great poet, but he was a poet nevertheless.

"He was a very sexy guy," says Cunningham. "He was always hitting on 
women -- tall, short. I was amused. I'm not criticizing. All the women 
loved him. He was glamorous and had a very beautiful apartment. He also 
laughed at himself. That, I thought, was refreshing. He didn't take 
himself very seriously -- but he took his cameras seriously."

Parks, who died Tuesday at the age of 93 in New York, crisscrossed 
America and the world for decades. He was an artist, writer, movie 
director. He was a Life photographer when that gig gave you a powerful 
cachet. In America, he used his cameras like six-shooters, aiming right 
at the nation's broken souls, her sad-eyed children, her blacks, browns 
and whites, her shoeshine men and faceless women with both dishrag and 
dignity.

In recent years Parks had been treated with tributes, a still-trim man 
with white hair out at Manhattan museums and galleries, swiveling into 
throngs of admirers, his hand shooting to shake this hand and that as he 
was reminded time and time again of the impact of his books and movies 
and photographs. Especially the photographs.

Parks's life had daguerreotype qualities: He was born in Kansas, he had 
worked as a sheepherder, he once went on the road with a semi-pro 
basketball team. In his youth he had struck out like Huck Finn, living 
in railroad towns, scribbling notes on postcards, letting those back 
home know all was okay.

"He didn't know fear," says Deborah Willis, a professor of history and 
imaging at New York University who befriended Parks in the 1970s, and 
who has done much to bring the work of black photographers to wider 
audiences. "He would always say to me, 'Debbie, you gotta keep working.' 
He would show me a way of moving on. I think it was rooted in the way he 
grew up."

Willis is teaching about Parks this semester at Harvard in a course 
titled "The Body and the Lens."

"It's about how Gordon used his work in a political way," she says.

Like Baldwin, Hughes and Richard Wright, he stretched boundaries and 
woke up others.

The government helped when he got work in the historical section of the 
Farm Security Administration's photography project.

In Washington in 1942 he aimed his camera at a woman no one had heard of 
by the name of Ella Watson. She was a cleaning lady with a thin, haunted 
face. She was poor as nickels. Parks once said the photograph said as 
much as a picture of a cross burning: "I thought then . . . that you 
could not photograph a person who turns you away from the motion picture 
ticket window, or someone who refuses to feed you, or someone who 
refuses to wait on you in a store. You could not photograph him and say, 
'This is a bigot,' because bigots have a way of looking like everybody 
else."

"With that image," says Willis of the Watson photograph, "he was trying 
to show survival -- and beauty. The beauty in looking at the woman in 
raising her children and adopted daughter. The broom and mop were iconic 
images of the American woman. He was constructing a story about women 
who survived."

There was much work in the '50s photographing actors, fashion shows, 
beautiful things. He had seen the awful cruelties of life, and then he 
aimed his camera into the expanse of beauty as well. Broadway intrigued 
him. There's Tallulah Bankhead onstage in "Dear Charles." There's 
languidly beautiful Hildegarde Neff onstage in "Silk Stockings." There's 
Lorraine Hansberry -- a world-beater following her Broadway debut of "A 
Raisin in the Sun" -- at Sardi's, her hair high on her head. There's a 
parish priest strolling through a wheat field with a parishioner.

But in the '60s Parks was determined again to put the saga of America 
and her deep hurts into his lens.

Chicago at that time was as cruel a city as could be when it came to 
black poverty, its ailments profound and endless. Congress was trying to 
find ways to address poverty with legislation, but it wasn't enough. In 
Chicago, there were children eating plaster in their cold apartments 
because they were hungry.

For its March 8, 1968, issue, Life gave Parks both pen and camera. He 
went to Chicago and stood on a street corner, checking the light. He 
held nothing back.

"Look at me and know that to destroy me is to destroy yourself," the 
photographer wrote in introducing his photo spread. "You are weary of 
the long hot summers. I am tired of the long hungered winters. We are 
not so far apart as it might seem. There is something about both of us 
that goes deeper than blood or black and white. . . . My children's 
needs are the same as your children's."

Sixteen pages of Parks in words and photos: a child sleeping against a 
bedroom wall with holes; children studying in darkness; a picture of 
Jesus; a snaggle-toothed child who had been eating plaster; a man with a 
wave of tears in his eyes; a child and mother on a bed.

Poorer than nickels.

And yet, there was something beautiful about the pictures. Something 
sadly beautiful.

"The beauty of those Chicago slum pictures was not that there were 
pictures there of birds in flight with beautiful color," says Jeanne 
Moutoussamy-Ashe, a photographer who was a friend of Parks's for 30 
years. "It was a beauty of the human spirit. There was beauty, no matter 
how hard the life. And that's what Gordon found interesting."

A year after his Life magazine spread, Parks directed his first movie, 
"The Learning Tree," adapted from his autobiographical novel of the same 
name. Two years later would come his hit, "Shaft." The movie, from the 
Ernest Tidyman novel, was about a black private eye who solves a 
kidnapping. It was an amalgamation of Parks's interests in fashion, 
dignity, breaking barriers.

Parks received fine reviews, Richard Roundtree became a star and Isaac 
Hayes won an Oscar for the "Shaft" musical score.

"Just auditioning for that movie was such a big deal," says Sherri 
Bronfman, who played the kidnapped daughter Marcy. "That was like the 
beginning of black movies being done.

"The white movie executives didn't know anything about us as a people. 
Parks did. We were used to auditioning for white directors who we felt 
didn't know us."

Bronfman showed up to begin filming the movie dressed in a miniskirt and 
maxicoat. She was happy. She waved hello to Parks and got herself to the 
wardrobe department. She was given a brown outfit to wear. On the set, 
Parks looked at her. He didn't like what wardrobe had outfitted her in. 
"He said, 'What you were wearing when you came in, go put that back on.' 
He had an eye," says Bronfman.

In black America, "Shaft" became both movie and cultural moment. Shaft 
was cool, stopped traffic with a wave of the arm, and didn't kowtow to 
anyone. He wasn't afraid of the man because he was The Man.

"Shaft showed our men in a whole other light," says Bronfman. "Shaft was 
take-charge. And the way Gordon allowed language to go in the movie.

"The stereotypes were not there. The characters were clearly defined."

Parks kept writing, autobiographies and photo books. He was generous 
with his time.

Moutoussamy-Ashe was in a photo exhibit at a Harlem gallery in 1976 
along with Dawoud Bey and Frank Stewart, two other photographers. At 
night she had studied Parks, looked at his images, thought she might 
someday meet that impressive man, but probably not. But there he was, at 
the door of her opening. "The great Gordon Parks showed!" she remembers. 
"We were just three novice photographers. Even the gallery owner said, 
'Wow.' We were just stunned."

As he grew sicker last year, he seemed to grow lonelier. There were 
nurses around, but no wife. He had been married three times and divorced 
three times. He was smitten with photographer Ming Smith, had been for 
years, and asked her to marry him. "I blushed," says Smith. "I told him 
I'd think about it."

Visitors to his United Nations Plaza apartment were awed by the beauty 
and the decorative touches. There were always fresh flowers. Artwork and 
books were everywhere. On New Year's Day, Smith and Bronfman went by to 
visit. There was laughter, cookies, sweets. He insisted on playing 
something on the piano. He rose, stiffly, and sat down. He played 
Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata."

An old man, young again. The women smiled.

When Bronfman reached in the closet for her coat, her eyes stopped. She 
saw it hanging there. Shiny and black and cool.

"His 'Shaft' coat," she says.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/08/AR2006030802486.html
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