UNITED STATES AUTHOR · ARTISTIC PHOTOGRAPHY · BIOGRAPHY
Gordon Parks
Also known as: Gordon Buchanan Parks, Gordon Parks, Sr.
Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks (November 30, 1912 – March 7, 2006) was an American photographer, composer, author, poet, and filmmaker, who became prominent in U.S. documentary photojournalism in the 1940s through 1970s—particularly in issues of civil rights, poverty and African Americans—and in glamour photography. He is best remembered for his iconic photos of poor Americans during the 1940s (taken for a federal government project), for his photographic essays for Life magazine, and as the director of the films Shaft, Shaft's Big Score, and the semiautobiographical The Learning Tree. Parks was one of the first black American filmmakers to direct films within the Hollywood system, developing films relating the experience of slaves and struggling black Americans, and helping create the "blaxploitation" genre.
NEWT WINGER lay belly-flat at the edge of the cornfield, his brown chin close to the ground, his eyes glued to a hill of busy ants.
— from The learning tree
Most acclaimed
A choice of weapons
Gordon Parks--photographer for Life magazine, writer, composer, artist, and filmmaker--was only 16 in 1928 when he moved from Kansas to St. Paul, Minnesota, after his mother's death. There, homeless and hungry, he began his fight to survive, to educate himself, and to "prove my worth." Working as a janitor, railroad porter, musician, or basketball player in such places as St. Paul, Chicago, and New York, Parks struggled against poverty and racism. He taught himself photography with a secondhand camera, worked for black newspapers, and began to document the poverty among African Americans on Chicago's South Side. Then his photographic work brought him to Washington, D.C., as first a photographer with the federal Farm Security Administration and later a war correspondent during World War II. This compelling autobiography, first published in 1966, tells how Parks managed to escape the poverty and bigotry around him, and launch his distinguished career, by choosing the weapons given him by "a mother who placed love, dignity, and hard work over hatred." - Publisher.
Bare witness
Once upon a time, there were three little girls. Charity. Justine. Anna. Individually, they’re lethal weapons. Together? They’re the force to be reckoned with at Liberty Investigations. Their bodies may be made for sin, but everything else is for kicking ass… Justine Petite. Pretty. Potentially deadly. Justine O’Neill may look like the kind of girl who’s never carried anything more hardcore than a designer purse, but she’s an expert in small arms and street fighting, with a rap sheet to prove it. Now Justine’s been assigned to guard Nigel Carter, CEO of Baron Industries—a company with ties to a past she’d rather forget. Her mission: accompany Nigel to Peru, where Baron’s new plant is proving highly unpopular. Nowhere in the brief was she instructed to react to in-flight turbulence by engaging in a hotter-than-hell kiss with her gorgeous client…Nigel’s hardly a Guns & Ammo kind of guy, but Justine’s tough, weapons-ready persona and sultry looks have him aching to get his hands on much more than her .38. The sexual heat between them is explosive, irresistible, and very, very dangerous. Because now someone has kidnapped Nigel’s daughter, and the only way to get her back is to take the fight right to the enemy’s door, where any distraction could be fatal, and falling in love is the riskiest pursuit of all…