Celebrating Black History Month: Photojournalist Gordon Parks

Gordon Parks, Self-Portrait, 1941

As COUPAR observes Black History Month, we spotlight the photojournalist Gordon Parks' brilliant images. He called his camera a "weapon against poverty and racism." Born in 1912, the youngest of fifteen, Parks grew up on a farm in segregated Fort Scott, Kansas. His mother died when he was fourteen, and he went to live with a sister in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Her husband threw the young man out on the streets at fifteen, and Parks made his living working odd jobs: as a singer and piano player in a brothel, traveling waiter, and semi-pro basketball player.  

Gordon Parks, Christian Dior Models, 1951

Influenced by images of Depression-era migrant workers taken by Farm Security Administration (FMA) photographers, he bought a Voigtländer Brillant camera in a pawnshop. After teaching himself to use it, Parks developed a freelance portrait and fashion career in Chicago while chronicling life in the city's black ghetto, the South Side. The South Side photos led to his joining the FMA in Washington, D.C., documenting the nation's social conditions. Parks' iconic images of America's poor were juxtaposed with the glamorous shots he took for Vogue. But fashion paid the bills so that he could expose injustice. 

Gordon Parks, The Invisible Man (Harlem, New York), 1952

By 1948, Parks had become the first African American staff photographer at Life magazine.  In 1951, he published a photo essay, "A Man Becomes Invisible," illustrating Ralph Ellison's novel, Invisible Man. Parks captured the narrator emerging from a New York City street manhole, "I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me…. When they approach me, they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me."  Fortunately, Parks was not invisible and left a legacy of photos, film, writings, and music when he passed away at 93 in 2006.