Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
Gordon Parks looked like an artist.
With his shock of white hair, grand mustache and seemingly ever-present pipe, Parks was a 20th-century Renaissance man. He worked as a photojournalist, fashion photographer, filmmaker, composer, novelist, poet and painter.
But Parks, who died Tuesday at age 93, was best known for his compassionate yet gritty 1940s documentary photography of the lives of black Americans -- first with the post-Depression Farm Services Administration and then with Life magazine. At the same time, he was shooting high fashion for Vogue magazine as a contemporary of the likes of Richard Avedon and Irving Penn.
He also was a film pioneer, becoming the first African-American to direct a film for a major studio in 1969. The Learning Tree, a drama, was based on his 1963 autobiographical novel about growing up in Kansas in the 1920s. He also wrote the script and the score.
In a considerable departure, Parks' next movie was Shaft. The 1971 hit starring Richard Roundtree as hip detective John Shaft is considered a classic of the blaxploitation genre. And it of course featured the catchy theme song by Isaac Hayes, which won an Academy Award. He made several more films, including Shaft sequel Shaft's Big Score.
In 1998, the Parks photographic retrospective Half Past Autumn was mounted and toured the country for years. In 2000, it attracted "flocks" of visitors to the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, executive director Charmaine Jefferson says. A former New York City cultural affairs commissioner and head of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, she says she spent a memorable evening with Parks listening to music he composed for a ballet.
She says he will go down as "one of the great photographers of our time" but also will be remembered for his music, his writing, his films, even his costumes. "He was so multitalented," she says. "He could do it all. And we were so proud of him."
Parks himself was always striving. In a 1998 interview with PBS' NewsHour, he said: "My life to me is like sort of a disjointed dream. ... It was a constant effort, a constant feeling that I must not fail, and I still have that. ... There's another horizon out there, one more horizon that you have to make for yourself and let other people discover it."
Contributing: Maria Puente
To see more of USAToday.com, or to subscribe, go to http://www.usatoday.com
© Copyright 2006 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
