🌐Video Wed 4/22 at 7 pm– Gordon Parks, American Photographer & Composer

Gordon Parks was an American photographer, filmmaker, writer, and composer whose work from the 1940s to 2000s documented race, poverty, civil rights, and urban life with empathy and social conscience. The first African American staff photographer at Life magazine and the first to direct a major Hollywood film, he created iconic images like American Gothic and directed The Learning Tree and Shaft, using his art as a “weapon” against injustice.

“A photographer can be a storyteller. Images of experience captured on film, when put together like words, can weave tales of feeling and emotion as bold as literature.… [Photographers] bring together fact and fiction, experience, imagination, and feelings in a visual dialogue that has enormous impact on how we observe and relate to the external world and our internal selves.” —Philip Brookman, “Unlocked Doors: Gordon Parks at the Crossroads,” Gordon Parks: Half Past Autumn, 1997

“I chose my camera as a weapon against all the things I dislike about America—poverty, racism, discrimination,” Gordon Parks

HBO: Gordon Parks: Half Past Autumn (2000) documentary photographer and filmmaker
Carlie Rose: Gordon Parks interview (2000)
PBS: How self-taught photographer Gordon Parks became a master storyteller
Great photos: Gordon Parks