Gordon Parks was born in Kansas and spent his youth in Minnesota. During the Depression he had a wide variety of jobs, including stints as a musician and as a waiter on passenger trains, which took him to various parts of the northern United States. By 1940 he had developed his photography skills to the point he wanted to try to make a living at it. Parks experienced "what prejudice was really like" when he came to Washington D.C. in 1942 for an opportunity to work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Parks later recalled that "discrimination and bigotry were worse there than any place I had yet seen."

Parks had gained a fellowship and planned on spending his fellowship year as an apprentice photographer in Director Roy Stryker's section, and had received encouragement from the FSA's Jack Delano when he apllied for the fellowship. When he arrived in Washington, Stryker resisted taking him on and expressed the supposed worries of others, in and outside of the agency, to hiring a black photographer. It took the interesction of the former head of the FSA to get Stryker to relent.

Once on board, Stryker exposed Parks to the works of Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, Jack Delano, John Vachon, and others. Their work highlighting the victims of economic and social indifference and outright racism showed Parks the value of photographing the victims instead of the perpetrators.

As a result of Parks looking for further examples of injustice and intolerance, Stryker suggested to Parks that he talk to the charwoman who worked in their buiding. Ella Watson, the charwoman, told a story of considerable personal tragedy in her immediate family. Parks took several posed pictures of her and the accompanying one is the most famous. Many more of Watson are the the Library of Congress' collection.

He told an interviewer in the early 1980's that he could not simply photograph the person who had discriminated against him and say, "This is a bigot, because bigots have a way of looking just like everybody else. What the camera had to do was expose the evils of racism, the evils of poverty, the discrimination and the bigotry, by showing the people who suffered most under it."

Parks went on to accomplish important work in literature, photography, musical composition, design, and movie direction.

Gordon Roger Alexander Buchannan Parks was born in 1912 and died in 2006.

Medium : 1 negative

Created/Published : August, 1942

Creator : Gordon Parks, photographer, 1912-2006

Part of the Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection hosued in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress

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Product #: wadgochewa