Photography At the age of twenty-eight, Parks was struck by photographs of migrant workers in a magazine. He bought his first camera, a
Voigtländer Brillant, for $12.50 at a Seattle, Washington, pawnshop and taught himself how to take photos. The photography clerks who developed Parks's first roll of film applauded his work and prompted him to seek a fashion assignment at a women's clothing store in St. Paul, Minnesota, owned by Frank Murphy. Those photographs caught the eye of Marva Louis, wife of heavyweight boxing champion
Joe Louis. She encouraged Parks and his wife, Sally Alvis, to move to Chicago in 1940, where he began a portrait business and specialized in photographs of society women. Parks's photographic work in Chicago, especially in capturing the myriad experiences of African Americans across the city, led him to receive the
Julius Rosenwald Fellowship, in 1942, paying him $200 a month and offering him his choice of employer, which, in turn, contributed to being asked to join the
Farm Security Administration (FSA), which was chronicling the nation's social conditions, under the auspice of
Roy Stryker.
Government photography Over the next few years, Parks moved from job to job, developing a freelance portrait and fashion photographer sideline. He began to chronicle the city's
South Side black ghetto and, in 1941, an exhibition of those photographs won Parks a photography fellowship with the FSA. named after the
iconic Grant Wood painting
American Gothic—a legendary painting of a traditional, stoic, white American farmer and daughter—which bore a striking, but ironic, resemblance to the Parks photograph of a black menial laborer. Parks's "haunting" photograph shows a black woman, Ella Watson, who worked on the cleaning crew of the FSA building, standing stiffly in front of an American flag hanging on the wall, a broom in one hand and a mop in the background. Parks had been inspired to create the image after encountering racism repeatedly in restaurants and shops in the segregated capital city. series, by Parks, shows Ella Watson and her family. Upon viewing the photograph, Stryker said that it was an indictment of America, and that it could get all of his photographers fired. He urged Parks to keep working with Watson, which led to a series of photographs of her daily life. Parks said later that his first image was overdone and not subtle; other commentators have argued that it drew strength from its polemical nature and its duality of victim and survivor, and thus affected far more people than his subsequent pictures of Mrs. Watson. (Parks's overall body of work for the federal government—using his camera "as a weapon"—would draw far more attention from contemporaries and historians than that of all other black photographers in federal service at the time. Today, most historians reviewing federally commissioned black photographers of that era focus almost exclusively on Parks.) where he photographed the all-black
332d Fighter Group, known as the
Tuskegee Airmen. He was unable to follow the group in the overseas war theatre, so he resigned from the O.W.I. Despite racist attitudes of the day,
Vogue editor Liberman hired him to shoot a collection of evening gowns. As Parks photographed fashion for
Vogue over the next few years, he developed the distinctive style of photographing his models in motion rather than in static poses. During this time, he published his first two books,
Flash Photography (1947) and
Camera Portraits: Techniques and Principles of Documentary Portraiture (1948). A 1948 photographic essay on a young Harlem gang leader won Parks a staff job as a photographer and writer with America's leading photo-magazine,
Life. His involvement with
Life would last until 1972. His photographs for
Life magazine, namely his 1956 photo essay, titled "The Restraints: Open and Hidden," illuminated the effects of racial segregation while simultaneously following the everyday lives and activities of three families in and near Mobile, Alabama: the Thorntons, Causeys, and Tanners. As curators at the High Museum of Art Atlanta note, while the photo essay by Parks served as decisive documentation of the
Jim Crow South and all of its effects, he did not simply focus on demonstrations, boycotts, and brutality that were associated with that period; instead, he "emphasized the prosaic details" of the lives of several families. An exhibition of photographs from a 1950 project Parks completed for
Life was exhibited in 2015 at the
Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Parks returned to his hometown, Fort Scott, Kansas, where segregation persisted, and he documented conditions in the community and the contemporary lives of many of his 11 classmates from the segregated middle school they attended. The project included his commentary, but the work was never published by
Life. During his years with
Life, Parks also wrote a few books on the subject of photography (particularly documentary photography), and in 1960 was named Photographer of the Year by the
American Society of Magazine Photographers.
Film In the 1950s, Parks worked as a consultant on various Hollywood productions. He later directed a series of documentaries on black ghetto life that were commissioned by
National Educational Television. With his film adaptation of his semi-autobiographical novel,
The Learning Tree, in 1969 for
Warner Bros.-Seven Arts. It was filmed in his home town of Fort Scott, Kansas. Parks also wrote the screenplay and composed the musical score for the film, with assistance from his friend, the composer
Henry Brant.
Shaft, a 1971 detective film directed by Parks and starring
Richard Roundtree as John Shaft, became a major hit that spawned a series of films that would be labeled as
blaxploitation. The blaxploitation genre was one in which images of lower-class blacks being involved with drugs, violence and women, were exploited for commercially successful films featuring black actors, and was popular with a section of the black community. Parks's feel for settings was confirmed by
Shaft, with its portrayal of the super-cool leather-clad, black private detective hired to find the kidnapped daughter of a Harlem
racketeer. Parks also directed the 1972 sequel, ''
Shaft's Big Score'', in which the protagonist finds himself caught in the middle of rival gangs of racketeers. Parks's other directorial credits include
The Super Cops (1974) and
Leadbelly (1976), a biographical film of the blues musician
Huddie Ledbetter. In the 1980s, he made several films for television and composed the music and a libretto for
Martin, a ballet tribute to
Martin Luther King Jr., which premiered in Washington, D.C., during 1989. It was screened on national television on King's birthday in 1990. In 2000, as an homage, he had a cameo appearance in the
Shaft sequel that starred
Samuel L. Jackson in the title role as the namesake and nephew of the original John Shaft. In the cameo scene, Parks was sitting playing chess when Jackson greeted him as,
"Mr. P." Musician and composer (late 1980s) His first job was as a piano player in a brothel when he was a teenager. Parks also performed as a jazz pianist. His song "No Love", composed in another brothel, was performed during a national radio broadcast by Larry Funk and his orchestra in the early 1930s. Parks composed
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1953) at the encouragement of black American conductor
Dean Dixon and Dixon's wife Vivian, a pianist, and with the help of the composer
Henry Brant. He completed
Tree Symphony in 1967. In 1989, he composed and directed
Martin, a ballet dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr., the
civil-rights leader, who had been assassinated.
Writing In the late-1940s, Parks began writing books on the art and craft of photography. This second career would produce 15 books and lead to his role as a prominent black filmmaker. His semi-autobiographical novel
The Learning Tree was published in 1963. He authored several books of poetry, which he illustrated with his own photographs, and he wrote three volumes of memoirs:
A Choice of Weapons (1966),
Voices in the Mirror (1990), and
A Hungry Heart (2005).
Essence magazine In 1970, Parks helped found
Essence magazine, and served as its editorial director during the first three years of its circulation. ==Personal life==