As Parks’ prestige grew, so did his editorial control over the notes that accompanied
the pictures. Compare the rewritten conservatism ofHarlem Gang
Leader(1948), a series Parks originally wanted to offer an open
perspective on the possibility for redemption, to the more nuancedThe
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 becameVogue’s first black photographer (another echo
with today, as BritishVogue’s
first black editor Edward Enninful seeks to recalibrate the magazine’s racial focus). In his 1990
autobiographyVoices In The Mirror, Parks said ofVogue: “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 withThe 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 wroteMartin, 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
andSex and the Citycreator
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’sGet 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 ofThe Learning
Tree’s poetic deconstruction of burgeoning black masculinity
inMoonlight, 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, prefiguresBlack Panther. Parks’ closest kindred spirit might be Donald Glover, a cross-form prodigy whose
masterful TV seriesAtlantareturned 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 memoirTo 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.
