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‘He’s inspired so many of us’: how Gordon Parks changed photography | Documentary films

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By and large, the segregation of 20th-century America was documented in black and white, storing our collective memory in stoic, colorless images of violence and exclusion. The late Gordon Parks, however, a titan of 20th-century photography, had taken a decidedly different approach. In 1956, as the first Black staff photographer of Life magazine, he traveled in and around Mobile, Alabama, on assignment to capture the realities of Jim Crow. He chose to shoot in color, aiming his lens at both the more vibrant and quotidian moments of Black American daily life: the church picnic, the trip to the ice cream shop, the hanging of laundry out to dry.

“His color renderings were beautifully poetic,” documentary film-maker John Maggio tells the Guardian, “almost like Rockwell paintings, until you look closer.” Aside from the mastery of Parks’s composition, each image had also captured prodding, daily indignities in minute but poignant detail – a young Black woman and her niece standing in their finest clothes, for example, standing below the blaring red neon of a “colored entrance” sign. The simple detail of a strap of her slip having fallen from her shoulder is the small crack in a painstakingly maintained facade, potently distilling a deep-seated, simmering frustration.

Parks, a groundbreaking photographer, film-maker, writer and musician who died in 2006, is the subject of A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks, a new HBO documentary directed by Maggio, and co-executive-produced in part by the art philanthropists Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz. Across a wide-ranging career, the film’s underlying focus is on Parks’s investment in the humanity of his subjects, particularly the tenderness in his depictions of Black life that had previously been hidden from view.

“Gordon allowed us to see the elegance of the lives that we live,” director Ava DuVernay says in the documentary, reflecting on the painterly qualities of Parks’s photographs, and the myriad ways in which he has influenced her approach to film. “When I look at his work, I think, ‘How did he get that, the ease and the intimacy?’ With actors, you’re trying to achieve the same ends – of intimacy, of a connection, of an understanding.”

DuVernay appears in an all-star cast alongside fellow director Spike Lee; writers Jelani Cobb and George Nelson; and photographers Devin Allen, LaToya Ruby Frazier and Jamel Shabazz, all of whom extol the breadth of his legacy through the impact he has made on their respective careers.

“I wanted to include a broad range of artists with different weapons,” Maggio explains, adding, “‘Choice of Weapons’ was Gordon’s term.” Parks had titled his own 1966 memoir Choice of Weapons, an apt metaphor describing the power he found in photography in his own fight for justice. “I might have turned to the gun or the knife,” he had said in a televised interview, “but by then I had chosen the camera.”

Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks was born in 1912 in Bourbon county, Kansas, the youngest of 15 children, in a small, segregated town mired by poverty and racial violence. He taught himself how to use a camera, and after eventually settling in Harlem, collaborated with the novelist Ralph Ellison on a landmark series depicting the highs and lows of their community. In a manifesto, Ellison had directed Parks to approach the imagery as both “document and symbol”, infusing the photographer’s work with a distinct gravitas for the rest of his career.

A family of four getting ice cream from segregated Sundae store, 1956. Photograph: Photograph by Gordon Parks/Courtesy of and © The Gordon Parks Foundation/Courtesy HBO

After establishing himself as a steady freelancer at Glamour and Vogue by the mid-1940s, Parks joined the staff of Life in 1948, having arrived on the magazine’s doorstep with a sensational idea: to shoot a photo essay on the leader of a Harlem gang. His ensuing depiction of 17-year-old Red Jackson of the Midtowners crew eschewed caricature in favor of a three-dimensional portrait of a young man: violent altercations appeared alongside scenes of mourning of a murdered friend, of a pensive gaze through a broken window, of a dutiful son drying the dishes in his mother’s kitchen.

“Gordon Parks had the ability to humanize people, and I really respected that about him,” the featured Baltimore-based photographer Devin Allen tells the Guardian. “Where my own peers and friends get demonized, he’s what inspires me to shed a different light on my community.”

Parks stayed on staff at Life for more than 20 years, shooting fashion, Broadway, Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, meanwhile transcending photography as a respected cultural figure. As he wrote more than a dozen books and frequently appeared on TV, the charisma that disarmed his subjects (along with his impeccable personal style) granted him entry into the ranks of high society. For more than 40 years, he even maintained a romantic relationship with the railroad heiress Gloria Vanderbilt.

“I always knew there was more to their relationship than just a family friend who would spend weekends in Long Island with us,” the CNN anchor Anderson Cooper recalls in the documentary, vaguely alluding to the true nature of his mother’s longtime friend. He later adds: “He had the ability to tell other people’s stories, and the ability to enmesh yourself in somebody else’s life … I wouldn’t be a reporter today if it weren’t for Gordon Parks.”

Gordon Parks, centre
Gordon Parks, centre. Photograph: The Gordon Parks Foundation/Photograph by Gordon Parks/Courtesy of and © The Gordon Parks Foundation/Courtesy HBO

In 1969, Parks broke new ground as the first Black man to direct and produce for a major Hollywood studio with The Learning Tree, a Warner Bros film based on his own coming-of-age novel, with a fully integrated cast and crew. In 1971, he directed and scored Shaft, a pioneering film in the blaxploitation genre about a suave Black detective that multiple figures in the documentary identify as the director’s alter ego.

“As a Black man with agency, Shaft for me is the logical apotheosis for Gordon,” Maggio says. Unfortunately, however, as the box office success of blaxploitation waned, so did Parks’s film-making opportunities. “The sad truth is that there was a ceiling for Gordon in Hollywood,” Maggio adds. “No one was calling him to make great World War II pics.”

Maggio says that he was inspired to create this film in light of recent events that resonated with Gordon’s work – namely the social movements that arose from the imagery of Sandra Bland, Eric Garner and George Floyd – which underscore both how much and how little has changed.

“I remember the solidarity march we had for Michael Brown in Baltimore, and how much it felt like the civil rights movement,” Allen says, although he keeps an optimistic view. “Gordon Parks laid the foundation for Black photographers to tell more Black stories. He’s inspired so many of us to pick up the camera as a weapon.”


By and large, the segregation of 20th-century America was documented in black and white, storing our collective memory in stoic, colorless images of violence and exclusion. The late Gordon Parks, however, a titan of 20th-century photography, had taken a decidedly different approach. In 1956, as the first Black staff photographer of Life magazine, he traveled in and around Mobile, Alabama, on assignment to capture the realities of Jim Crow. He chose to shoot in color, aiming his lens at both the more vibrant and quotidian moments of Black American daily life: the church picnic, the trip to the ice cream shop, the hanging of laundry out to dry.

“His color renderings were beautifully poetic,” documentary film-maker John Maggio tells the Guardian, “almost like Rockwell paintings, until you look closer.” Aside from the mastery of Parks’s composition, each image had also captured prodding, daily indignities in minute but poignant detail – a young Black woman and her niece standing in their finest clothes, for example, standing below the blaring red neon of a “colored entrance” sign. The simple detail of a strap of her slip having fallen from her shoulder is the small crack in a painstakingly maintained facade, potently distilling a deep-seated, simmering frustration.

Parks, a groundbreaking photographer, film-maker, writer and musician who died in 2006, is the subject of A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks, a new HBO documentary directed by Maggio, and co-executive-produced in part by the art philanthropists Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz. Across a wide-ranging career, the film’s underlying focus is on Parks’s investment in the humanity of his subjects, particularly the tenderness in his depictions of Black life that had previously been hidden from view.

“Gordon allowed us to see the elegance of the lives that we live,” director Ava DuVernay says in the documentary, reflecting on the painterly qualities of Parks’s photographs, and the myriad ways in which he has influenced her approach to film. “When I look at his work, I think, ‘How did he get that, the ease and the intimacy?’ With actors, you’re trying to achieve the same ends – of intimacy, of a connection, of an understanding.”

DuVernay appears in an all-star cast alongside fellow director Spike Lee; writers Jelani Cobb and George Nelson; and photographers Devin Allen, LaToya Ruby Frazier and Jamel Shabazz, all of whom extol the breadth of his legacy through the impact he has made on their respective careers.

“I wanted to include a broad range of artists with different weapons,” Maggio explains, adding, “‘Choice of Weapons’ was Gordon’s term.” Parks had titled his own 1966 memoir Choice of Weapons, an apt metaphor describing the power he found in photography in his own fight for justice. “I might have turned to the gun or the knife,” he had said in a televised interview, “but by then I had chosen the camera.”

Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks was born in 1912 in Bourbon county, Kansas, the youngest of 15 children, in a small, segregated town mired by poverty and racial violence. He taught himself how to use a camera, and after eventually settling in Harlem, collaborated with the novelist Ralph Ellison on a landmark series depicting the highs and lows of their community. In a manifesto, Ellison had directed Parks to approach the imagery as both “document and symbol”, infusing the photographer’s work with a distinct gravitas for the rest of his career.

A family of four getting ice cream from segregated Sundae store, 1956
A family of four getting ice cream from segregated Sundae store, 1956. Photograph: Photograph by Gordon Parks/Courtesy of and © The Gordon Parks Foundation/Courtesy HBO

After establishing himself as a steady freelancer at Glamour and Vogue by the mid-1940s, Parks joined the staff of Life in 1948, having arrived on the magazine’s doorstep with a sensational idea: to shoot a photo essay on the leader of a Harlem gang. His ensuing depiction of 17-year-old Red Jackson of the Midtowners crew eschewed caricature in favor of a three-dimensional portrait of a young man: violent altercations appeared alongside scenes of mourning of a murdered friend, of a pensive gaze through a broken window, of a dutiful son drying the dishes in his mother’s kitchen.

“Gordon Parks had the ability to humanize people, and I really respected that about him,” the featured Baltimore-based photographer Devin Allen tells the Guardian. “Where my own peers and friends get demonized, he’s what inspires me to shed a different light on my community.”

Parks stayed on staff at Life for more than 20 years, shooting fashion, Broadway, Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, meanwhile transcending photography as a respected cultural figure. As he wrote more than a dozen books and frequently appeared on TV, the charisma that disarmed his subjects (along with his impeccable personal style) granted him entry into the ranks of high society. For more than 40 years, he even maintained a romantic relationship with the railroad heiress Gloria Vanderbilt.

“I always knew there was more to their relationship than just a family friend who would spend weekends in Long Island with us,” the CNN anchor Anderson Cooper recalls in the documentary, vaguely alluding to the true nature of his mother’s longtime friend. He later adds: “He had the ability to tell other people’s stories, and the ability to enmesh yourself in somebody else’s life … I wouldn’t be a reporter today if it weren’t for Gordon Parks.”

Gordon Parks, centre
Gordon Parks, centre. Photograph: The Gordon Parks Foundation/Photograph by Gordon Parks/Courtesy of and © The Gordon Parks Foundation/Courtesy HBO

In 1969, Parks broke new ground as the first Black man to direct and produce for a major Hollywood studio with The Learning Tree, a Warner Bros film based on his own coming-of-age novel, with a fully integrated cast and crew. In 1971, he directed and scored Shaft, a pioneering film in the blaxploitation genre about a suave Black detective that multiple figures in the documentary identify as the director’s alter ego.

“As a Black man with agency, Shaft for me is the logical apotheosis for Gordon,” Maggio says. Unfortunately, however, as the box office success of blaxploitation waned, so did Parks’s film-making opportunities. “The sad truth is that there was a ceiling for Gordon in Hollywood,” Maggio adds. “No one was calling him to make great World War II pics.”

Maggio says that he was inspired to create this film in light of recent events that resonated with Gordon’s work – namely the social movements that arose from the imagery of Sandra Bland, Eric Garner and George Floyd – which underscore both how much and how little has changed.

“I remember the solidarity march we had for Michael Brown in Baltimore, and how much it felt like the civil rights movement,” Allen says, although he keeps an optimistic view. “Gordon Parks laid the foundation for Black photographers to tell more Black stories. He’s inspired so many of us to pick up the camera as a weapon.”

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