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"Boy with June bug, 1963"
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The blue walls are for poetry.
Other walls in two slightly different shades of gray are for the photographic works that catapulted his images and his name to household icons.
Less than two weeks before the opening of Half Past Autumn, Dennis Kiel, curator of photography for the Cincinnati Art Museum, has Gordon Parks' professional life leaning against gleaming walls. Designers and technicians take measurements, mark spots, tweak the lighting and consult a miniature model of the gallery before returning to the walls.
They are canvases.
There will be a listening post for visitors to hear selections of Parks' Classical music compositions. They're empty now, but while the exhibit hangs, glass cases will display original Life magazines, faded and soft but still strong with Parks' documentation of gang life in Harlem, Flavio da Silva's plight in Rio de Janeiro, lithe French models and Duke Ellington's elegant fervor.
There's almost too much to display, to see, to read, to hear.
That's what happens when a life like Parks' -- now 88 years old -- explodes, and its talents are allowed to run and take flight.
But ask the man, and he eschews the only moniker that actually suits him.
Renaissance Man? Nah. Not Parks.
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"Mother and Child, Blind River, Ontario, 1955"
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"Everybody says so. I don't put any claim on it, myself," Parks says by phone from his New York City apartment.
His voice is a steady near-whisper. He does not fumble for words, although without a doubt he has repeatedly recounted the same story of his life.
"Whatever I've accomplished is because I was trying to get enough money to buy a ham-and-egg sandwich."
It's not modesty or an underestimation. Work meant food, survival, another day. Born the youngest of 15 children on a farm in Fort Scott, Kan., Parks was bound to fulfill his dying mother's wishes when he went to live with a sister in Minnesota.
"I never finished high school," he says. "My mother died when I was 15, so I had to become a man over-night. I've discovered that, by trying to exist, I've learned a lot of things."
Like tenacity and the blissfulness inherent in ignorance. No one ever told him he couldn't succeed, so who was he to fail?
After his brother-in-law kicked him out in the dead of an unforgiving Minnesota winter, Parks rode public transportation all night to keep warm. He took menial jobs playing piano in a pool hall, shoveling snow, bussing tables. He played one season of semi-professional basketball and worked as a porter on a train.
So what kept him from becoming another faceless Negro stepping and fetching luggage to the rhythm of Jim Crow? The fear of disappointing his parents.
"Most people don't feel that they could write a novel or succeed in the music world, so they don't even try," Parks says. "I was more or less forced into it, because I didn't want to fail. I was the youngest of 15 children. It was a matter of not wanting to disappoint them."
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"Ella Watson and Her Grandchildren, 1942"
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That fear of failure imbued the young Parks with nerve. His early jobs in photography came because he went after them with the energy of a young man who didn't know any better than to walk into Eastman-Kodak in Minneapolis with rolls just shot in Seattle with his pawn shop camera.
Because he asked and showed early promise, he got his first show. Next, he bluffed his way into Frank Murphy's dress shop to "shoot fashions" with a borrowed Speed Graphic camera. After Parks double-exposed all but one print, Murphy's wife invited the young photographer to return to correctly shoot an entire portfolio.
He moved his family to Chicago at the urging of Marva Louis, wife of heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis, and began documenting poverty. His work won him a Rosenwald Fellowship. He was introduced to Roy Stryker, head of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), then home to two renowned photographers, Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, among others. In Washington, D.C., Parks encountered staggering racism in the capital where he assumed "democracy would hold forth."
He also discovered the power of photography as social commentary, epitomized by "American Gothic, 1942" his photo of a spindly black woman clutching a mop and a broom against the backdrop of the American flag. It remains an unblinking look at the black underclass.
The FSA closed in 1943, and Parks moved to New York. He landed a job at Vogue but yearned for a position at Life, then the country's most influential magazine.
Again, fearing nothing but failure, Parks walked unannounced into Life's offices with his portfolio. Begging for a viewing, he was hired and assigned a story on Harlem gang life, a story that pummeled America with Red Jackson and his culture of crime, knife fights and funerals.
Meanwhile, black America was simultaneously holding its breath and pulling for one of its own. It was the beginning of a pattern for Parks. His invitation into the most private of black worlds came only after his subjects knew they could trust him. He was, after all, working for "the man." Conversely, whites might have been wary of Parks because of his blackness.
He straddled two worlds and, succeeding in both, connected them whether they wanted the association or not. But for Parks, it was only a job. He just happened to be a black man with a camera. However, he wasn't naïve enough to think he wouldn't have to prove himself once he was allowed access.
"When I went to Life, it wasn't because I was black," Parks says. "I was trying to make a living, but I knew that once I got there I had to prove myself, because I knew I was making a way for other blacks. I knew there'd be others coming behind me."
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"Ethel Shariff in Chicago, 1963"
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And with the "weight" of two worlds hanging from his camera bags, Parks set sail.
He photographed luminaries from Ingrid Bergman and Rober-to Rosselini, Langston Hughes and Ellington to Gloria Vander-bilt and Muhammad Ali. He's received 41 honorary doctoral degrees and written 14 books of poetry, autobiography and fiction.
His upcoming books include A Star for Noon, an homage to women through photographs, poetry and an accompanying compact disc; Arias of Silence and Glimpses of Infinity, two collections of poetry; and The Sun Stalker, a biographical novel about painter J.M.W. Turner which has taken him seven years to write.
Parks says he's left no genre unturned, that he's tackled all he wanted to, albeit not to his satisfaction.
"I've done everything I wanted to do, but I don't feel I've done it well enough," he says. "I think I could've done it better in retrospect."
But in retrospect, there's no denying the significance of Parks' works -- individually and collectively. Yes, the time was ripe for Parks and what he had to tell the world. It helped that he spoke so elegantly and plainly.
His first book, The Learning Tree, published in 1965, has been translated into 12 languages. The subsequent movie, based on his book, was Hollywood's first nod to a black man to produce, write and direct a major studio-backed motion picture.
Then came Shaft. Shutchomouth.
Shaft -- man, movie and ideal -- validated blackness. It was an unexpurgated tour of hostility, cool and sexuality. That coat and turtleneck sweater made a mark on us as indelible as that wah-wah guitar, those sex scenes and the language. (See related story about Parks' films and their impact, page 22.)
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"American Gothic, 1942"
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Asked why he dipped his brush in photography, poetry, musical composition and autobiographical writing, Parks says he had no choice. He just has so much to say.
"I just needed to express myself in some way," he says. "I chose to fight my way up in the world (despite) discrimination and bigotry."
And although he points to writers Ralph Ellison and Hughes as inspiration, he says the first two people he knew in his life remain his heroes.
"You've asked me who my heroes are: It's my mother and father," he says. "In 15 years my mother gave me so much more than could be expected, because she knew she was dying and she knew she had to do it."
In turn Parks, though travelling and working most of the time, tried to return to his four children what was instilled in him.
"Love is possibly the most important thing you could give a child," he says. "It's what's sustained me."
After four marriages, four children (Gordon Jr. died in a plane crash in Africa after filming Super Fly, which was partially financed by the elder Parks), five grandchildren and as many great-grandchildren, Parks now lives alone. Beset only slightly by loneliness, he says he lives with his words and music. He writes poetry and plays the piano but doesn't have much time for reading. The music of Rachmani-noff plays constantly on the stereo.
"It gets rather lonely without them, without the noise," he says. "I tell them they've got a lot of work to do to catch up with me."
He is only half joking. And what of the rest of his life? Is Half Past Autumn merely a man looking back on his life or an artist meditating on his career?
"I wrote down a number of titles and finally wrote down one that made the most sense," Parks says. "I think of my life in terms of seasons. I'm 88. I'm about half past autumn.
"I hope there'll be a winter." ©
