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A HUNGRY HEART GORDON PARKS (NOVEMBER 30, 1912 - MARCH 7, 2006) Deborah Willis 16* N k a Journal of Contemporary African Art Portrait of Gordon Parks. Photo courtesy of Deborah Willis. B orn on November 30, 1912 in Fort Scott, Kansas, Gordon Parks has spent some seventy decades observing, writing, documenting , photographing, and interpreting his life experiences. He was a man who was committed to imaging culture. In his last memoir, A Hungry Heart: A Memoir, he recalled the lessons his father taught him, mere months before his fifteenth birthday and the death of his mother. "Your heart will tell your feet which roads to take," his father said. "There'll be signposts along the way giving out directions. You'll have the right to question them, but don't ignore them. Each one is meant for something." (338) His father encouraged him to dream. "Beneath the light of many moons I've still heeded Poppa's advice," Parks noted in his memoir. "I'm still smiling , still recalling his words from a long way off. Their meaning has never stopped grow ing.... Despite the waves o f anguish that threaten me at times, it never gives up on me. It is imbedded like a jewel in my hungry heart." (339) Best known as a photographer, Parks wrote a number o f books and articles, scored concertos, directed films, and played piano on the concert stage. Guided by his father's advice, he transformed his own life and affected the lives countless admirers. In his last works A Hungry Heart and Eyes with Winged Thoughts: Poetry and Images, Parks revealed a life story that was both intensely personal and deeply influenced by the outside world. Though several "firsts" are listed on his biography —first black director to make a movie for a major studio, first black photographer for Life, and first black photographer hired by the Farm Security A dministration—he did not see himself as a pioneer. As he w rote in a poem titled "M o mma" in Eyes with Winged Thoughts, he's never supported "blaming your skin's blackness for tumbling you downward." By refusing to be defined by the racism of the day, Parks was free to explore his ideas. His art and writings were informed by the political climate o f America in the sixties. He affectionately remembered those years as he described culling photographs for his 1997 retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery in Half Past Autumn. (As the co-curator for the exhibition, I remember looking through piles o f photographs with the fellow curator Philip Brookman as we shared stories that we really were too young to know about.) "The photographs we chose to represent my years o f journalistic endeavors were crammed with things that had been far beyond my reach," Parks writes. "I had been given assignments I had never expected to earn. Some proved to be as different as silk and iron. Once, crime and fashion was served to me on the same day. The color of a Dior gown I photographed one afternoon turned out to be the same color as the blood o f a murdered gang member I had photographed earlier that morning up in Harlem." In the early 1960s, I sat in my mom's beauty shop reading Life magazine and discovered the photographs o f Gordon Parks. As a pre-teen, I still remember vividly the effect those visual stories had on my life (which also would be shaped by the visual image). Recently, I thought about why his work had inspired my decision to become a phoSpring / Summer 2008 N k a > 1 7 Gordon Parks, Washington, D.C Government charwoman. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-fsa-8b14845, tographer. It is because, to Parks, life is a banquet: "What a superb feast it is! The sweetness o f recognitions and success, the bitterness of poverty, hunger, and bigotry overlying the rituals o f existence : marriage, birth, work, season with pain and joy, and most o f all—love." (1) It is inspiring to see that he lived until the age of 94, and each time I visited him over the...

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