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Back to Fort Scott: Gordon Parks
Karen Haas, Isabel Wilkerson, and Peter W. Kunhardt Jr.
"The first African American photographer to be hired full time by Life magazine, Gordon Parks was often sent on assignments involving social issues that his white colleagues were not asked to cover. In 1950 he returned on one such assignment to his hometown of Fort Scott in southeastern Kansas: he was to provide photographs for a piece on segregated schools and their impact on black children in the years prior to Brown v. Board of Education. Parks intended to revisit early memories of his birthplace, many involving serious racial discrimination, and to discover what had become of the 11 members of his junior high school graduation class since his departure 20 years earlier. But when he arrived only one member of the class remained in Fort Scott, the rest having followed the well-worn paths of the Great Migration in search of better lives in urban centers such as St. Louis, Kansas City, Columbus and Chicago. Heading out to those cities Parks found his friends and their families and photographed them on their porches, in their parlors and dining rooms, on their way to church and working at their jobs, and interviewed them about their decision to leave the segregated system of their youth and head north. His resulting photo essay was slated to appear in Life in the spring of 1951, but was ultimately never published. This book showcases the 80-photo series in a single volume for the first time, offering a sensitive and visually arresting view of our country's racialized history. Gordon Parks (1912-2006) was born into poverty and segregation in Fort Scott, Kansas. The self-taught photographer also found success as a film director, author and composer. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts and over 50 honorary degrees"-- Publisher's description
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Gordon Parks: How the Photographer Captured Black and White America
Carole Boston Weatherford and Jamey Christoph
The story of a self-taught photographer who used his camera to take a stand against racism in America. His white teacher tells her all-black class, You'll all wind up porters and waiters. What did she know? Gordon Parks is most famous for being the first black director in Hollywood. But before he made movies and wrote books, he was a poor African American looking for work. When he bought a camera, his life changed forever. He taught himself how to take pictures and before long, people noticed. His success as a fashion photographer landed him a job working for the government. In Washington DC, Gordon went looking for a subject, but what he found was segregation. He and others were treated differently because of the color of their skin. Gordon wanted to take a stand against the racism he observed. With his camera in hand, he found a way. Told through lyrical verse and atmospheric art, this is the story of how, with a single photograph, a self-taught artist got America to take notice.
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The Photographs of Gordon Parks
Charles Johnson
Providing a unique view of American life during the Great Depression and Second World War, each volume in the Fields of Vision series focuses on a single photographer whose vision helped shape the collective identity of America and influenced the way we look at photographs in the 21st century. All of the images in each volume are chosen from the Library of Congress’s renowned collection of Farm Security Administration (FSA) and Office of War Information (OWI) photographs. Born into poverty in Kansas, Gordon Parks (1912–2006) rose to become one of the most celebrated photographers of the twentieth century. He was inspired to teach himself photography after seeing Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographs in a magazine, and joined the FSA staff in 1941. He later worked for Life magazine and was also a successful musician and composer, the author of many books, and a director.
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Soul Sanctuary: Images of the African American Worship Experience
Jason Miccolo Johnson, Gordon Parks, Cain Hope Felder, Barbranda Lumpkins Walls, Cardes H. Brown, John Hurst Adams, H. Beecher Hicks Jr., and Lawrence N. Jones
Fifty African-American photojournalists open a "revelatory window to a world of pulsing blackness" with photographs of African-American culture, from the Mississippi cotton fields to the New York Stock Exchange. Simultaneous. National ad/promo. TV tie-in. Tour.
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Bare Witness: Photographs
Gordon Parks, Maren Stage, and Thomas K. Seligman
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Bare witness: photographs by Gordon Parks, organized by the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University"--Title page verso.
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Gordon Parks: No Excuses
Ann Parr and Gordon Parks
A biography of the famous African-American photographer. Gordon Parks grew up in poverty in Kansas, but his mother always told him, Don't come home with any excuses. His perseverance resulted in his becoming a photographer for Life magazine as well as a successful novelist, director, producer, screenwriter, and music composer.
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A Hungry Heart: A Memoir
Gordon Parks
Gordon Parks, acclaimed photographer, filmmaker, composer, and author of fiction and nonfiction, has participated in, been witness to, and documented many of the major events in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. Born in Fort Scott, Kansas, on November 30, 1912, he left home at age fifteen when his mother passed away. For the next twelve years, he lived in Minneapolis, Minnesota, working as a piano player, bus boy, Civilian Conservation Corpsman, and professional basketball player before taking up photography in the late 1930s and moving to Chicago. He was awarded the first Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in photography in 1942 and chose to work with Roy Stryker at the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in Washington, D.C. During World War II, he was an Office of War Information (OWI) correspondent. He photographed fashion for Vogue and Glamour before joining the staff of Life in 1949 and remained a photojournalist for the magazine until 1969. He also became famous in the late 1960s for his stories on Black revolutionaries, later incorporated into his book Born Black. He was a founder and editorial director of Essence magazine from 1970 to 1973. His film career began in 1961 when he wrote and directed a documentary, Flavio. He received an Emmy Award for another documentary, Diary of a Harlem Family, in 1968. He produced and directed Hollywood films including The Learning Tree, Shaft, Shaft's Big Score, The Super Cops, and Leadbelly. He is first and foremost a celebrated photojournalist and fine art photographer whose work, collected and exhibited worldwide, is emblematic of American culture. In A Hungry Heart, he reaches into the corridors of his memory and recounts the people and events that shaped him: from growing up poor on the Kansas prairie to withstanding the unbearably cold winters of Minnesota to living on the edge of starvation in Harlem during the Depression. He more than survived the challenges and crises of his life; he thrived and has become one of the most celebrated and diversely talented figures in American culture
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Eyes with Winged Thoughts
Gordon Parks
In Eyes with Winged Thoughts, the forty-four photographs and fifty-eight poems, reflecting on his long and extraordinary life, offer a rare glimpse of his thoughts and feelings about everything from romantic love to the Iraq war and the passing of Pope John Paul II. He has done it all. Gordon Parks's life is an astonishing litany of in the 1940s he was the first African-American photographer to work for the Farm Security Administration and for Vogue and Life magazines; in the 1960s he would become the first African-American director of a major motion picture. A dominating figure in contemporary American culture, he is an artist of uncompromising vision and creativity. In 2002 Parks received the Jackie Robinson Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award and was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame, just the latest in a series of honors that began when he received a prestigious Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1941 and which now includes an Emmy, a National Medal of the Arts, and over fifty honorary doctorates. Now in his nineties, he could easily rest on his laurels, but the luminous photographs on display in Eyes with Winged Thoughts and the poems -- some meditative and lyrical, some raw with emotion about the war in Iraq and the tragedy of the tsunami -- show that he is still a true American Renaissance man.
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The Sun Stalker: A Novel Based on the Life of Joseph Mallord William Turner
Gordon Parks
Turner was born in London on April 23, 1775, educated at the Royal Academy of Arts, and at the remarkable age of 15 began exhibiting his paintings at the Academy. He continued to show his work there until 1850." "Gordon Parks became dedicated to researching Turner's life to fulfill a promise to a poet friend who had passed away before producing the film he dreamed of on this turbulent painter
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A Star for Noon: An Homage to Women in Images, Poetry, and Music
Gordon Parks
Although Parks has done other books that combine his poetry and images, this new title A Star for Noon stands out for two reasons. First, it has a distinct and universal theme: romantic love. Parks has combined eighteen poems (composed for this book) with 65 exquisite female nudes and still lifes, to create a lyrical and unabashedly romantic homage to the beauty of women. And, secondly, he plans to incorporate within the book a CD of his own music, specially composed and performed by him to accompany this lovely work. The poems follow loosely the arc of a romance -- from the first attraction into passion, conflict, loss and a renewed connection with the beloved. About half the photographs are previously unpublished. The female nudes are both sensuous and reverential; the rich colors ...
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Midway: Portrait of a Daytona Beach Neighborhood
Gordon Parks and Southeast Museum of Photography
"Gordon Parks was an American photographer, musician, writer, and film director. In 1943, while working for the Office of War Information, Gordon Parks was given an assignment to travel to Daytona Beach, to photograph the renowned African American educator and activist Mary McLeod Bethune, and her surroundings. The pictures he took capture a time of imminent and momentous change." [taken from Museum of Arts & Sciences, Daytona, FL]
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Half Past Autumn: A Retrospective
Gordon Parks, Philip Brookman, and Corcoran Gallery of Art
Covers the author's photographic work with Life magazine
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Harlem, Gordon Parks: the artist's annotations on a city revisited in two classic photographic essays
Gordon Parks and Michael Torosian
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Glimpses Toward Infinity
Gordon Parks
The author's poems accompany his photographs of imaginary landscapes composed of leaves, flowers, plants, and shells
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Arias in Silence
Gordon Parks
Arias in Silence encompasses the breadth of Gordon Park's compelling new photographic work. Now eighty, he has developed a new vision--fragmentary found objects appear against abstract watercolor backgrounds, evoking buttes the American Southwest, the Great Prairies, the rolling surf of the Atlantic, or the landscapes of Chinese scroll paintings. More than two dozen of his original, previously unpublished poems accompany the photographs ans express the wisdom, love, yearning, and drive that are the core of Park's artistic life.
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Songs of my people: African Americans : a self-portrait
Eric Easter, Gordon Parks, Michael D. Cheers, Dudley M. Brooks, and Sylvester Monroe
Fifty African-American photojournalists open a "revelatory window to a world of pulsing blackness" with photographs of African-American culture, from the Mississippi cotton fields to the New York Stock Exchange. Simultaneous. National ad/promo. TV tie-in. Tour.
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Voices in The Mirror: An Autobiography
Gordon Parks
Alone after his mother’s death, homeless in a Minnesota winter, young Gordon struggled to stay in school, working at menial jobs and riding streetcars all night to escape the cold. Refusing to succumb to despair, he instead transformed his anger at poverty and racism into a creative force and went on to break down one barrier after another. He was the first black photographer at Vogue and Life, and the first black screenwriter and director in Hollywood, at the helm of such projects as the award-winning Shaft. And his novel, The Learning Tree, has sold more than a quarter of a million copies. Spanning the major events of five decades, Voices in the Mirror takes readers from Minnesota and Washington, D.C., to the glamour of Paris and the ghettos of Rio and Harlem. His intimate portrayals of Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini; of the Muslim and African American icons Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad and Muhammad Ali; of the young militants of the civil rights and black power movements; and of the tragic experiences of the less famous, like the Brazilian youngster Flavio, combine to form an unforgettable story. Gordon Parks’s life is a metaphor for the courageous vision and extraordinary resilience of the African American community, while also serving as a testament to the spirit and generosity that are its hallmarks. -- Taken from goodreads
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The Way We Were: New England Then, New England Now
Daniel Okrent and Gordon Parks
Photographs document everyday life in New England during the late forties and early fifties, and are accompanied by comments on how things have changed since then
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Shannon
Gordon Parks
A story set in New York early in the 20th century about a young woman who marries a poor man instead of a richer one.
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Harlem document: photographs 1932-1940
Aaron Siskind, Gordon Parks, Ann Banks, and Federal Writers' Project
A portrait of Black urban America and the people, culture, and lifestyles of Harlem during the 1930s
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To Smile in Autumn
Gordon Parks
An account of the artist's life from 1944 through 1978 focuses on the prime of his career as poet, journalist, humanitarian, composer, and motion-picture director
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Moments without Proper Names
Gordon Parks
This oversized book of photography and verse reflects many aspects of the highly emotional, uncommonly eventful life of the author: the confusion and poverty he experienced as a child growing up in Fort Scott, Kansas; the bigotry, drug addiction, terror, chaos and blatant inhumanity to which he was exposed as a rising journalist and photographer; the beauty and sophistication with which his professional career is associated today.
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Born Black
Gordon Parks
Originally published in 1971, Gordon Parks’s Born Black was the first book to unite his writing and his photography. It was also the first to provide a focused survey of Parks’s documentation of a crucial time for the civil rights and Black Power movements. More than fifty years later, this reimagined, expanded edition of Born Black offers deeper insight into the series collected in it. The original publication featured nine articles commissioned by Life magazine from 1963 to 1970—some of the material never published before—supplemented with later commentary by Parks and presented as a personal account of the important moments in the history of the civil rights and Black Power movements. This new edition of Born Black includes the original text and images, as well as additional images from each of the nine series, facsimiles from the original publication, manuscripts and related correspondence, and reproductions of Life magazine spreads. Parks’s images and words are accompanied by essays from celebrated scholars Jelani Cobb and Nicole R. Fleetwood, the inaugural Gordon Parks Foundation Genevieve Young Fellow in Writing. The book is edited by Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr. and Michal Raz-Russo. The series selected by Parks for Born Black—a rare glimpse inside San Quentin State Prison; extensive documentation of the Black Muslim movement and the Black Panthers; his commentaries on the deaths of civil rights leaders Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.; intimate portrait studies of Stokely Carmichael, Muhammad Ali, and Eldridge Cleaver; and a narrative of the daily life of the impoverished Fontenelle family in Harlem—have come to define Parks’s legendary career as a photographer and activist. This expanded, in-depth volume of Born Black highlights the lasting legacy of these projects and their importance to our understanding of critical years in American history. -- Taken from The Gordon Parks Foundation
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