Photographer Gordon Parks inspired a new generation of artists
Los Angeles Times
Entertainment & Arts
By Deborah Vankin
“A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks” debuts on HBO Monday night, a date that commemorates the photographer’s late November birthday. The film is less a chronological telling of Parks’ life story (the 2000 HBO documentary “Half Past Autumn: The Life and Works of Gordon Parks” details that) and instead focuses on his legacy — specifically on the generation of photographers, activists and artists that he inspired. Singer-songwriter Alicia Keys and rapper-producer Swizz Beatz are executive producers and luminaries including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bryan Stevenson, Ava DuVernay and Spike Lee are among those who make appearances in the film, speaking to how Parks — who was also a film director, composer, author and activist — shaped their bodies of work and the world.
“At a time and in a society where Black people were told far too often that we’re criminals, that we’re ugly, that we’re less worthy to have the spotlight on us for any reason,” DuVernay says in the film, “Gordon put a lens and a light on us for ourselves and allowed us to see the elegance of the lives that we live and the places where we are.” […]
Three contemporary photographers provide the connective tissue for the film’s structure: Baltimore-based Devin Allen, LaToya Ruby Frazier of Chicago, and New York City’s Jamel Shabazz. Their personal stories and insights about Parks add another layer of intimacy and immediacy that courses through the documentary’s narrative.
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Frazier, 39, always knew she would be an artist while growing up in the Pennsylvania steel mill town of Braddock. She studied photography at Edinboro University, but learned about Parks from a homeless woman she was making portraits of at a nearby shelter at the time.
“I came back with the portrait that we made together and when I handed it to her, she said: ‘this reminds me of a man I once saw on PBS, Gordon Parks,’” Frazier says, adding that she raced to a Barnes & Noble afterward and bought a book about Parks.
The next semester she learned more about Parks in a photography class, which touched on his aforementioned “American Gothic” portrait, one of his most famous images. Watson, the woman in the image, was a so-called “charwoman” or janitor at the time. The photograph was taken at the Farm Security Administration offices in Washington, D.C.
“That photograph by Gordon taught me how to speak through a photograph and make social commentary about the United States,” Frazier says. “This image asks the viewer a question, which is: ‘what is the value of a Black woman’s life in America?’”
Frazier now focuses her lens on working-class communities, healthcare inequality and environmental justice issues. She spent five months living in Flint, Mich., photo-documenting how the city’s water crisis affected residents. Last year, she photographed Breonna Taylor’s family for “Vanity Fair.” It’s work she feels would make Parks proud.
“I think that the images that I made speak to his spirt and his influence,” she says.
Courtesy of: Los Angeles Times
