Documentary recalls Gordon Parks
Can a single powerful image still change the world? Tell a story? Open minds? Change them? “A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks” (9 p.m., HBO, TV-MA) recalls the remarkable life and career of the photojournalist and filmmaker as well as the artists and journalists he still inspires.
For years, Parks (19122006) was the only Black photographer on the staff of Life magazine, a glossy weekly known for its evocative photography. Before television supplanted and replaced it, Life was found in millions of homes, blending celebrity profiles and hard news, showcasing the work of the greatest photographers of the 20th century.
Parks escaped a life of poverty and violence that claimed several of his childhood friends. He discovered photography while working as a railroad porter. He’d scour magazines left behind by passengers and tourists, publications he’d never seen in rural Kansas, as the son of a farmer with 14 other siblings.
From the beginning, Parks celebrated ordinary Black men and women, adding a touch of glamour to photo profiles or ordinary neighbors appearing in Black newspapers. Parks’ fame grew when he worked for the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration (FSA). Hired to document the resettled farms displaced during the 1930s Dust Bowl weather phenomenon, he joined the ranks of other artists like Dorothea Lange and Ben Shahn.
In his most famous work, Parks documented the cleaning woman for the FSA. In an image modeled after Grant Wood’s iconic “American Gothic” painting, he had her hold her mop in front of an oversized American flag. The photo has been studied, reproduced, collected and dissected ever since, with people seeing a downtrodden Black working woman still proud to represent her country, a place where many considered her invisible at best.
Parks’ career would see him documenting the rich and famous as well as “the common man,” to use a popular midcentury expression and point of pride.
He would also direct the 1971 thriller “Shaft,” the first Hollywood film with a swaggering Black male lead, a radical film that launched the so-called blaxploitation genre.
“Weapons” includes accounts by contemporary artists and photographers, including Devin Allen, who, inspired by Parks, felt compelled to cover 2015 Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Baltimore and found that one of his images made the cover of Time magazine, the corporate cousin and survivor of Life.
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