Film explores how Parks’ art, career changed lives of others
Gordon Parks was the first Black photographer hired by Life magazine. He was a pioneering photojournalist, a film director (“Shaft,” “The Learning Tree”), a bestselling novelist and a composer.
Parks was also a fighter. Whether he was photographing socialites, gangsters, civil rights icons or movie stars, Parks used his art as a megaphone, pulpit, magnifying glass and spotlight, all in an ongoing battle against prejudices and snap judgments.
Parks the fighter is the focus of “A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks,” a new documentary that recently debuted on HBO and is streaming on HBO Max. The 90-minute film from director John Maggio is less interested in chronicling Parks’ life than it is in looking at the way his art and career changed other people’s lives.
Through interviews with famous devotees (filmmaker Ava DuVernay, sports icon Kareem Abdul-Jabbar); critics (Jelani Cobb of the New Yorker); and up-and-coming young photographers (Devin Allen, LaToya Ruby Frazier), “A Choice of Weapons” takes a deep and insightful dive into Parks’ groundbreaking body of work.
Parks died in 2006 at age 93. But for the artists and activists who followed in his footsteps, his seismic impact is as jolting as ever.
“He defined himself on his own terms,” says photographer Frazier, best known for “Flint is Family,” her 2016 photo essay on the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. “Those photographs are what enabled me to save my own life.”
By the time Life hired him in 1948, Parks had worked as an apprentice with the Farm Security Administration and as a correspondent for the Office of War Information. He had also photographed women’s fashion for Vogue magazine.
Parks was Life’s only Black photographer through times of segregation, racial strife and civil rights victories, and it was his ability to tell the diverse stories of Black Americans that made his work resonate far beyond the newsstand.
Park’s photo essays took on all of the issues and people of the day, including the ones not everyone wanted to talk about. That meant everything from discrimination and segregation in the deep South, to crime in the city from the side of the criminals and the police, the life of a Harlem family, the challenges of being Muhammad Ali, and the rise of the Black Muslim movement.
“It’s the idea of, ‘If I pick up my camera, I can say something and show something, and I will be heard, and it will be seen and a story will be told,’ ” says DuVernay.
In its determination to show as much of Parks’ work as possible, “A
Choice of Weapons” cycles through images at a rapid clip. The documentary is at its best when it slows down long enough to let one of its experts linger over Parks’ genius for capturing emotionally charged moments with such intimacy.
Devin Allen was an aspiring photographer when his shot capturing a charged moment from Baltimore’s Freddie Gray protests in 2015 ended up on the cover of Time magazine. He learned about photography from poring over Parks’ books at Barnes & Noble. He speaks passionately about the way Parks tapped into Ali’s humor and humanity, and Parks’ ability to tell nuanced stories with no words at all.
“He could tell both sides of the story,” Allen says.
“As the artist, we are the medium between opposing sides, and we are the only ones that can actually create that narrative and start a conversation.”