american gothic revisted - gordon parks dead

Folk, we just lost another one – Gordon Parks. Parks was born in Kansas in 1912 but had to move to Minnesota at the age of 15 after the death of his mother. Mr. Parks to me was one of those rare breeds, a renaissance man the likes of Cheikh Anta Diop in my eyes. I consider myself to be a renaissance man as well, thus the pain I feel after losing this great artistic and creative mind.

He was a musician, writer, director, and most notably a photographer. He took up photography and in 1942; he was given the chance to work for the Farm Security Administration where one of his most notable photographs - "American Gothic”.

Parks went to Washington on a fellowship from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, which included other fellows of James Baldwin, Ralph Bunche, and Zora Neale Hurston. He continued to display his greatness both in music, film and literature. He directed Shaft, Shaft's Big Score and the Learning Tree, a novel he penned after his growing up in rural Kansas.

He also worked at Vogue Magazine and eventually moved to Europe in 1950 Moves to work as a correspondent for Life magazine and was their first African-American photographer. If you want to see his work, I suggest you take a look at what he did in 1948 on the violent gang wars in Harlem through the eyes of Red Jackson, a 16-year-old gang leader.

In 1966, he published the first of three autobiographies, A Choice of Weapons which eventually led to him writing several other books including essays and poetry. Some of these works include: Gordon Parks: A Poet and His Camera, Gordon Parks: Whispers of Intimate Things and In Love, in 1971, Moments Without Proper Names in 1975 and Born Black, a collection of essays on the struggle for civil rights in America. Parks was the greatest African American photojournalist of our time since James Vandrezee. No matter what his American Gothic and Vanderzee’s Barefoot Prophet will always leaving resplendent and pronounced image of the America we came from; the one I engendered myself to never forget.