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Gordon Parks was not only a renowned photographer but also a poet, composer, director and mentor to so many, past and present, a Renaissance man whose talent spanned disciplines. Born in Fort Scott, Kansas, Parks used his craft to illuminate the lives, worlds and humanity of people.
He created the Gordon Parks Foundation with Life magazine editor Philip B Kunhardt Jr in 2006 to promote and support artistic and educational initiatives that advance his legacy and vision. In celebration of the foundation’s 20th anniversary, the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York will present the exhibit Gordon Parks: Voices in the Mirror, named after his final memoir published in 1990.
It’s an opportunity for people to see how his work transcends time as he used his lens to connect people. In the exhibit, the families of Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X, Alice and Rebecca Walker, Bryan Stevenson, Ava DuVernay, Hank Willis Thomas and others remember the importance of Parks’s legacy and the impact of his work.
The Guardian spoke with some of these dignitaries on the impact of Parks’s legacy and the images taken by him that resonate with them the most.
Lonnie Ali
Lonnie Ali is the wife of Muhammad Ali, and the interim president and CEO of the Muhammad Ali Center.
My favorite Gordon Parks photo is the one where he followed Muhammad to London in 1966. It’s a young [Ali] in a very pensive or reflective mood, leaning against a staircase with a suit. The world was beginning to open up for him, and it was that pensive look of reflection on where he had been and where he was going.
Gordon was so good at capturing the moment, and I don’t even think it was something Muhammad could stand there and pose for. Park’s photos of him are one of the more intimate portrayals of [Ali].
The article that Gordon did on him did a lot to make people see the human side, the charismatic, charming, witty, little childish side of Muhammad, that endeared him to so many.
His images can still connect you to his subjects and what he photographed. That power of his artistry in capturing the moment still draws people in, even generations who never met him.
Muhammad and Parks carved out the life they wanted, and they were not to be denied. They were trailblazing men. Resilient. Warriors in their own way. Muhammad, on a canvas with his fist, but also with his heart, and Gordon with his camera, and with his heart and wit of how he made that picture come alive.
Kyle Johnson
Kyle Johnson starred in Gordon Parks’s film The Learning Tree, released in 1969 and based on Parks’s 1963 autobiographical novel. The film was the first major Hollywood studio film directed, produced and scored by a Black director. Johnson portrayed Parks through the fictional character Newt in the movie.
Working with Gordon was quite relaxed, quite comfortable, and he made everyone else feel that way. When we began shooting, he said to us: “This is going to be our chance to tell our story, cause my story is the story of so many Black people in America. It’s our story, and our history.”
This was really the first time that Black people could see themselves as they understood themselves on screen. Almost everyone who approached me after seeing the movie was speaking about how uplifting it was and how they’ve been waiting their lives to see this portrayal of themselves as fully fledged human beings appearing on the screen.
His painting appears in the photo from [Parks’s photo book Arias in Silence] as the background, and the thing that is in the foreground is hard to believe, but that is a leaf. He’d go out on a walk and see something interesting and bring it back, and he shot the things in his living room with the available light. The leaf seems animate, like an expression of a human being. Even the shape of it. You can almost see the person inside.
It’s like the great impressionistic painters. Maybe you don’t see the woman the painter was seeing; maybe you don’t see it the first time, the second time or the 10th time. But if you come back to the impressionistic work, you see something that you didn’t see before. That’s the thing: now it jumps out at you, whereas before you couldn’t recognize it. I think it was just this sense of life or afterlife that it has. There’s something about it that just says, this is not an object. This is not a leaf. This is an expression of an actual person of a spirit and a soul. It has enough to suggest its previous existence as a human, and yet something of that remains here.
Gordon very much had a sense of [the decisive moment], which is instilled in all of his work. If you look at his work, whether it’s portraiture, fashion or things in the natural world, if the photo was taken two seconds before or after, it just wouldn’t be his photo.
Rebecca Walker
Rebecca Walker is a writer, teacher and co-founder of the Third Wave, a non-profit organization that advocates for young women to get involved in activism and leadership roles. She is the daughter of novelist Alice Walker.
At first glance, the image looks like a beautifully outfitted, middle-class Black father and his children going to get some ice cream, and it feels very contemporary because of the colors. I am happy to see a Black middle-class father and his children in this way because so often Black men and their children are portrayed as victims and, generally, in a kind of degraded way.
Then, if you look again, you see the sign that says “White” and “Colored”. It dawns on you that, in fact, this exchange is being delineated and shaped by a deeply painful, integrating system of segregation. This beautiful family is meant to feel less than, and the white person inside bustling to serve them, even though she’s in a service position, is made to feel superior, just based on their race. Then the weight of the Jim Crow South settles, and then the disturbance is there, just lurking, and it begins to haunt you.
I think what was so moving to me was this brother’s dignity. They’re going up to get their ice cream, and he’s not going to let this sign or this system keep him from it. They’re not going to be made to feel inferior in any way. It’s a real portrait of something that we need to pay more attention to, which is the ways in which our hard-earned dollars are propping up a system that is not necessarily benefiting Black people. It’s also very moving to me because my mother grew up in the Jim Crow South, and in many ways it’s a representation of a scene that I imagine could come from her life.
I felt like Gordon was seeing us and we didn’t even know he was looking. He was just walking around in a seemingly very ordinary way. We could see in the photographs that he was really seeing so much more deeply, seeing beyond what we were presenting and seeing into our deepest beings, not just in the present, but how we were connected to the past and the future in those moments and how we transcended time. He really understood the historical importance at the moment.
I’m proud of Mr Parks for taking that image, understanding its importance and how beautiful we are, and doing it so beautifully with such care. As opposed to leading with the brutality, he’s leading with the humanity.
Hank Willis Thomas
Hank Willis Thomas is a conceptual artist known for his work focused on themes of culture and identity.
Gordon Parks is definitely the definition of a Renaissance man. He was a person who had lived many lives. Parks led by the way he lived his life, the quality in which he lived, and the way he carried himself, which was deeply inspiring. It seemed as if the rules of the world that were fed out to confine him did not actually limit him at all, but he actually excelled past and transcended any boundary that society put in his place.
He was so committed to not being confined to a box that I’m always more compelled by the sensibilities and the revelations I have when learning about the stories behind the photographs. This idea that we’re looking at a picture, literally standing in someone’s shoes, looking through someone else’s eyes, and the fact that he chose that specific second to capture, I think, is fascinating. It’s a time-travel for me.
He took the image American Gothic while working for the US government during a time when the government thought that documenting the stories and sometimes the struggles of the American people could be a way to bond and inspire us and create empathy and compassion. I think that he probably learned through that early assignment that those lessons were something he could carry on to his career, and so when I think about his other work, I can’t help but think that he was still, in some ways, continuing that project.
I think the story [in his photos] is about empathy, bearing witness, courage, perseverance and seizing the moment. I hope that he wouldn’t just try to tell us something, but would try to encourage us to think, invite us to look more closely at the things we take for granted, or don’t even see or bear witness to. Every story he found and every person he found, he was making history, not copying it.
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Gordon Parks: Voices in the Mirror is on display at the Jack Shainman Gallery until 6 November
