As Parks’ prestige grew, so did
his editorial control over the notes that accompanied the pictures.
Compare the rewritten conservatism of Harlem Gang Leader (1948), a series Parks originally wanted to
offer an open perspective on the possibility for redemption, to the
more nuanced The White
Man’s Day Is Almost Over (1963), his essay on the Black Muslim community
whose leader Malcolm X felt such a rapport he made Parks godfather
to one of his children.
Though backlit with a harsh political reality, Parks’
composition often drifts into the surreal: ‘Doll Test’ (1947) has
an uneasy fairy-tale optimism; ‘A Man Becomes
Invisible’ (1952) plunges the hero of
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man into a manhole underground;
in ‘Boy With June Bug’ (1963), a boy dozes in a field as a tethered
insect tied crawls on his face, an image one critic interpreted as
Gordon’s own life story.
Parks transitioned seamlessly
into high fashion and became Vogue’s first black photographer (another echo with
today, as British Vogue’s first black editor Edward Enninful seeks to
recalibrate the magazine’s racial focus). In his 1990
autobiography Voices In
The Mirror, Parks said
of Vogue: “I studied the names of its famous
photographers - Steichen, Blumenfeld, Horst, Beaton,
Hoyningen-Huené, thinking meanwhile that my own name could look
quite natural among them.” Undaunted by celebrities, he
photographed Iman, Muhammad
Ali, Ingrid
Bergman, Duke Ellington, Eartha Kitt and the
sculptor Giacometti, though he grew impatient with the entitled
whims of the models.
His cinematic career showed a
similar duality to his photographs. He became the first black
artist to produce and direct a major Hollywood film with
The Learning Tree
(1969), an adaptation of his
autobiographical 1963 novel about a young man coming of age in
1920s Kansas (Parks also wrote the music and the script). Very
different though just as symbolic, Shaft
(1971) reappropriated black
stereotypes with a leather-jacketed swagger complemented by Isaac
Hayes’ score, a counterpoint to Sidney Poitier’s idealised doctors
and teachers. A sometime poet, jazz pianist, abstract painter and
classical composer, Parks also wrote Martin, a ballet tribute to Martin Luther
King.
In private, he shared the
elegance, modernity and rigour of his work. His dress sense was an
extension of his artistic versatility, a mix of casualwear
(roll
necks, trench
coats and chore
coats similar to Shaft himself) and more formal
dress, often accessorised with a pipe. Between three marriages, he
romanced heiress Gloria Vanderbilt and Sex and the City creator Candace Bushnell (she was 18, he
58).
Since his death at the age of 93
in 2006, Parks’ influence has been palpable in some of the most
urgent art of today. In Jordan Peele’s Get Out (which won the Oscar for
Best Original Screenplay this year), Daniel Kaluuya's photographer
Chris recalls Parks himself, just as the metaphor of the “Sunken
Place” rhymes with Parks’ Invisible Manhole-underground. There’s a
shadow of The Learning
Tree’s poetic
deconstruction of burgeoning black masculinity in
Moonlight, and the moral ambiguity of Mahershala Ali’s
drug-dealing surrogate father figure in the ambivalence of Parks’
work on gangs. Shaft, an early black superhero of sorts,
prefigures Black
Panther. Parks’ closest
kindred spirit might be Donald Glover, a cross-form prodigy whose
masterful TV series Atlanta returned last week. In arecent
New Yorker profile, Glover put forward the paradox that
“blackness is always seen through a lens of whiteness”, but that
now white America likes seeing itself through a black
lens.
For the age of Trump and Black
Lives Matter, it’s apt and exhilarating that the same individual
could inspire such different artists. In the notes to his 1967
project on the Fontanelles, Parks defined himself through his
audience: “What I want. What I Am. What you force me to be is what
you are. For I am you, staring back from a mirror of poverty and
despair, of revolt and freedom. Look at me and know that to destroy
me is to destroy yourself.” Twelve years later in his memoir
To Smile in
Autumn, he acknowledged
a porous mystique: “I've disappeared into myself so many different
ways that I don't know who 'me' is.” Enigmatic, decorous,
reflective, Gordon Parks is a double master of blackness through a
white lens and whiteness through a black lens, the invisible man as
unforgettable icon.
