"Gordon Parks: Crossroads"
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All photographs courtesy of the Gordon Parks Foundation and the Howard Greenberg Gallery.
Organized by: art2art Circulating Exhibitions
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December 23, 2011 through February 5, 2012

" I picked up a camera because it was my choice of weapons against what I hated most about the universe: racism, intolerance, poverty. I could have just as easily picked up a knife or gun, like many of my childhood friends did . . . most of whom were murdered or put in prison . . . but I chose not to go that way. I felt that I could somehow subdue these evils by doing something beautiful that people recognize me by, and thus make a whole different life for myself. "
--Gordon Parks

Parks was born in Fort, Scott, Kansas. In 1938 Parks purchased his first camera at a pawn shop. He pursued taking pictures with gusto and within months his probing portraits of African-American women were exhibited in the windows of the Eastman Kodak store in Minneapolis.
While Parks pursued numerous hard-hitting documentary assignments for Stryker, he also accepted commissions in fashion and glamour photography, initially for Midwestern department stores, and soon for Vogue and Glamour magazine. "The camera is not meant to just show misery," he explained. "You can show beauty with it; you can do a lot of things. You can show things you like about the universe, things you hate about the universe. It's capable of doing both."

In 1949 Parks became the first black staff photographer at Life magazine, where he would remain on the masthead for a quarter century. With his first two photo-essays for Life - on the gang wars of Harlem, and on the latest Paris collections - he announced his remarkable range, His intimate photo essays on the Black Panthers, the nascent Black Muslim movement, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s death remain classics - "my sentiments lay in the heart of black fury sweeping the country," he later wrote - but equally classic were his extended photo-portraits of cultural icons as varied as Barbara Streisand, Langston Hughes, Alexander Calder, Ingrid Bergman, Duke Ellington and Muhammad Ali. "Success among whites never made Parks lose touch with black reality." Malcolm X wrote in his autobiography.

While Parks was alive he continued to challenge stereotypes and break through society's - and his own - barriers. In the process of this exploration, Parks blossomed into one of the 20th century's true Renaissance men. He authored four volumes of poetry. He helped found Essence magazine and served as its editorial director. In 1968 he became the first African-American to write, produce, direct, and score a major hollywood film, The Learning Tree, based on his semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel. Its success led to plum directorial assignments, most famously Shaft and its sequels, one of MGM's top-grossing film franchises of the 1970s. Parks also directed an autobiographical film for PBS, Moments Without Proper Names, as well as authoring four qutobiographical accounts - A Choice of Weapohns (1966), To Smile in Qutumn (1979), Voices in the Mirror(1990), and Half Past Autumn (1997) - the last of these being the catalog of a major retrospective organized by the Corcorn Gallery for Born beads.
The Gordon Parks: Crossroads features 45 memorable photographs drawn from all aspects of Parks' storied career.