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Half Past Autumn: A Retrospective
Gordon Parks
By Delores Edwards
Shifting from lensman to storyteller, photographer and author, Gordon Parks
blends words and images together in Half Past Autumn: A Retrospective. Published
in conjunction with a traveling exhibition organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in
Washington, DC, the coffee-table book is a glimpse into Parks’s 50-year career as an
artist. With 195 duotone and 95 color photographs, including pictures of himself and
members of his family, the book details Parks’s early work for the Farm Security
Administration (FSA), his career as a photojournalist for Life magazine and his recent
color additions.
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Portraits of celebrities such as Muhammad
Ali, Gloria Vanderbilt, Duke Ellington and others are sprinkled throughout the book's 360
pages, but it's photographs that document poverty, segregation, and racial bigotry that
are the strengths of this autobiographical pictorial essay.
“Looking back meant recalling childhood friends who perished by guns or knives.
Hostility wasn’t the answer,” wrote Parks. “Finally, after a long search
for weapons to fight off the oppressions of my adolescence, I found two powerful ones-the
camera and the pen.”
Thoughtful and reflective, Parks traveled the world to capture the images contained in his
thesis. Whether it is in pictures of a malnourished 12-year-old Brazilian boy,
African-American aviators during World War II or Parisian couture, Parks’s creative
eye allows the reader to view contrasting societies in a variety of settings.
His 1942 photograph, American Gothic of Ella Watson, a black government charwoman, remains
one of his most discussed pieces. Standing with a broom and a mop in front of the American
flag, Watson offers a silent testimony about racism and inequality in America. The
picture, which parodies the famous Grant Wood painting of a thin-lipped Midwestern farmer
and the fretting woman at his side, indicts the racism Parks fought to overcome.
Born Gordon Alexander Buchanan Parks in Fort Scott, Kansas in 1912, Parks was the youngest
of 15 children. He was inspired to learn photography after stumbling upon work by members
of the FSA. Self-taught, Parks later worked at FSA, the Office of War Information and the
Standard Oil Corporation, photographing the lives of Americans around the globe. Before
joining Life magazine, Parks was a fashion photographer for Vogue magazine. His career
also included writing 15 books, musical compositions and directing the motion picture,
Shaft.
A craftsman with a camera, Parks knows how to spark social commentary. First published in
1968 for Life, the visual diary about the Fontenelle family connects human faces to the
issue of poverty in the United States. Using contrasting light and shadow, Parks
illustrates the dirty feet of a struggling mother, a single teardrop from the eye of
hungry child, and the holes in the walls that surround a young boy as he sat in bed
wearing his coat. Snapshots of the lived-in but unlivable condition surrounding the Harlem
family spark rage and empathy.
Readers will appreciate the body of work in this memoir. Eloquently written, the book
contains powerful text and strong pictures. At times, it's difficult to decipher where the
author’s life ends and where his career begins due to the book's intertwining of
Parks life and work. Nevertheless, Half Past Autumn is a rich thematic autobiography of
one man’s journey through life. M
April 2000
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