On Gordon Parks’ Legacy And Black Photography Today
ESSENCE
Entertainment
By Aramide Tinubu
LaToya Ruby Frazier, Devin Allen and Jamel Shabazz are the Subject of the New Documentary, ‘A Choice Of Weapons: Inspired By Gordon Parks,’ Debuting On HBO.
By the time Gordon Parks shot his first photograph for Life Magazine, his mother had died, racism had forced him out of his hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas, and he’d worked in brothels, as a singer, and as a professional basketball player. He was not yet 30 when he captured the infamous image titled “American Gothic” and the follow-up sequence of photos of Ella Watson. Watson worked as a cleaner in the Farm Security Administration building where Parks had a fellowship. HBO’s documentary, A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks, doesn’t simply examine the photographer’s extensive body of work. It also explores his activism and what it meant to preserve the 20th-century Black experience through his camera lens.
In all of his varied versions of life, Parks strived to be seen, and he learned quickly through his photographs how important it was for the world to see Black people as they truly lived and existed, instead of solely through a white gaze. By documenting the lives of Malcolm X, Black rural Southerners, and even a gang leader in Harlem, Parks would become a leader, inspiring a new generation of photographers who have used their cameras to active their voices. […]
Frazier’s journey behind the camera came only after immersing herself with her subjects. “I was making portraits of families living in homeless shelters in Erie, Pennsylvania for my beginning photography course at Edinboro University,” she explained. “At first, I did not take my camera to the shelter but instead spent time with each family to the point people thought I resided in the shelter too. One evening, there was a lovely Black woman whose omnipresent energy had drawn me in close to her. When I returned the next week to give her prints of her portrait, that’s when she told me that the image reminded her of a man she once saw on PBS named Gordon Parks and then [she] asked me if I ever heard of him, to which I replied, ‘No,’ and she said, ‘Well you should.’”
[…]
Courtesy of: ESSENCE
