Gordon ParksBesprekingen

My boyfriend remembers this book as one that really impacted him as a child. I read it for the first time today and I find the story's themes timeless. Great photographs, too.

Injustice, violence, the Civil Rights Movement, fashion and the arts--Gordon Parks captured half a century of the vast changes to the American cultural landscape in his multifaceted career. I Am You: Selected Works 1934–1978 reveals the breadth of his work as the first African American photographer for Vogue and Life magazines as well as a filmmaker and writer.
Reportage for major magazines dominated Parks’ work from 1948 to 1972. He chronicled black America’s struggle for equality, exposing the harsh realities of life in Harlem, institutionalized racism and shocking poverty. Parks was equally accomplished as a portraitist, capturing figures such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Duke Ellington and Ingrid Bergman. He turned his attention to film in the 1960s with social documentaries, as well as the cult classic Shaft (1971).
This volume traces all the threads of Parks’ achievement, examining the interaction between his photographic and filmic visions.
Gordon Parks (1912–2006) was born in Fort Scott, Kansas. He worked as a brothel pianist and railcar porter, among other jobs, before buying a camera at a pawnshop, training himself, and becoming a photographer. In addition to his tenures photographing for the Farm Security Administration (1941–45) and Life (1948–72), Parks evolved into a modern-day Renaissance man, finding success as a film director, writer and composer. He wrote numerous memoirs, novels and poetry, and received many awards, including the National Medal of Arts and more than 50 honorary degrees.

A must-read for anyone interested in what it was like growing up Black in 1920's rural America.

About the author: Gordon Parks, born in 1912, was already a world-renowned photojournalist for Life Magazine and fashion photographer for Vogue Magazine when this autobiographical novel was published in 1969. He later directed the Hollywood film of the same name. By the end of his life, he had been a true Renaissance man...photographer, director, poet, author, composer, film scorer...even created a ballet.½

Gordon Parks revisits the chronology of his life. His experiences as a photographer for Conde Nast and Life magazine exposed him to a range of situations, several of which resulted in favorable occurrences because of his sensitivity and efforts to help others. His family life is also exposed.

Gordon Parks is a national treasure. After an amazing career as an outstanding photographer, filmmaker, novelist, composer and now a poet. Parks has won numerous awards for his craft and has 50 honorary doctorates. Now in his nineties he has a wonderful book of poetry that spans his life across varying subjects and pulls deeply at his Africa- American heritage. He touches on various stages of his life, from boyhood dreams to current events like the Iraq war. Each poem has it's own flavor some with a sharp cutting edge and others with a twist of sentimentality. But either way he gets his point across. As with any book of poetry the reader will have some favorites and some not so favorites. This book is well worth trying.

The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks is a story about being a black kid in the south long before the days of Civil Rights. It's funny in places and very sad in others. If you want to know how lucky you are today, read this book.

Sadly no longer with us, Gordon Parks was the epitome of the renascence man. Poet, author, director, musician, composer and, of course, photographer. This book accompanied the documentary film of the same name yet it does manage to stand alone and show the scope of Gordon Park's life and work.

I grew up in southeast Kansas so this book was particularly interesting to me. It holds some of the best geographical descriptions of the southeastern part of the state. Though racially not accepted as a child, Fort Scott has now embraced the author as a favorite son. He is now buried in the place he always called home.

While the Black Power movement was reshaping America, trailblazing director Gordon Parks made this groundbreaking blockbuster, which helped launch the blaxploitation era and introduced a new kind of badder-than-bad action hero in John Shaft (Richard Roundtree, in a career-defining role), a streetwise New York City private eye who is as tough with criminals as he is tender with his lovers. After Shaft is recruited to rescue the kidnapped daughter of a Harlem mob boss from Italian gangsters, he finds himself in the middle of a rapidly escalating uptown vs. downtown turf war. A vivid time capsule of gritty seventies Manhattan that has inspired sequels and multimedia reboots galore, the original Shaft is studded with indelible elements—from Roundtree’s sleek leather fashions to the iconic funk and soul score by Isaac Hayes.

(Source: The Criterion Collection)

dust jacket

(I have a 1963 battered hardcover via used bookstore.)