from “Gordon Parks: Bigger Than Life”
This passage was derived from HMH One Assessment, DoDEA adopted resource.
(1) During the Great Depression, times were miserably hard, especially for a young African American. Gordon traveled to Chicago and New York, hoping to find work. By the age of twenty-four, having married a high-school classmate, Gordon was happy to get a full-time job with the railroad.
(2) Gordon waited tables on a train that ran from Minneapolis to Seattle. In his spare time, he read the magazines that his well-to-do passengers left behind. One day he came across photographs that showed the effects of the Depression on the rural poor. The sadness and confusion on the faces of drought and dust-storm victims, traveling in broken-down jalopies and looking for work of any kind, reminded him of his own impoverished childhood.
(3) He noticed that the photographers worked for the Farm Security Administration, a program set up by President Roosevelt to help farmers. Gordon never forgot the power of these photographs to show the reality of poverty. But he also loved looking at the photographs of beautiful clothes and models featured in stylish fashion magazines such as Vogue. He even wrote his name under one of his favorite pictures, thinking that “Gordon Parks” looked quite natural there.
(4) In December 1937, with just seventeen dollars in his pocket, Gordon bought his first camera for twelve dollars and fifty cents. He studied photography during breaks on his train runs and took pictures while on layovers in Minneapolis and Chicago. “I read every book on art and photography I could afford,” he said. “I talked to painters, writers, and photographers whenever I discovered them on my car.” One day he noticed big red letters spelling LIFE on a passenger’s camera bag and struck up a conversation with Life photographer Bernard Hoffman. “Come and work for us someday,” Hoffman said. Laughing, Parks promised he would do just that.
(5) To get a start working as a photographer, Gordon visited department stores asking for a chance to photograph their merchandise. Everyone refused the inexperienced black photographer except Mrs. Murphy, the owner of one of the most fashionable women’s clothing stores in St. Paul. “I’m willing to give you a chance,” she said. “Can you be here tomorrow evening?”
(6) With borrowed professional equipment and a few last-minute instructions from a local camera store owner, Gordon returned and shot the photographs. “How beautiful!” Mrs. Murphy exclaimed the next day. Unknown to her, Gordon had double exposed all but one picture of her models and gowns. Enlarging the only good picture, he had placed it on an easel at the front door. “Where are all the rest?” she asked. When Parks told her, she said, “What’s double exposure anyway? If you can do pictures like that, I want you to do more.”
(7) The wife of heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis noticed and admired Gordon’s photographs for Mrs. Murphy. With her support, he was able to move to Chicago and get work as a fashion photographer. But Gordon never forgot the power of the camera to expose misery and injustice. “I knew that more than anything else I wanted to strike at the evil of poverty,” he said. When he held an exhibition of his fashion photography, he also included documentary photographs of the urban poor on Chicago’s South Side. Rich and poor, black and white, were both in his photographs and in the audience.
(8) Parks was ecstatic in 1941 when he won a fellowship that sent him to Washington, D.C., to work for the Farm Security Administration—the agency whose photographers had so impressed him just a few years before. But he was dumbfounded by the racism he experienced upon arriving in the nation’s capital. Taking a walk on his first afternoon, he was not allowed to eat at a drugstore counter because it served only whites. He was ignored by salesclerks in a department store and denied entry to a movie theater. Parks returned to the FSA building, angry and frustrated. His boss encouraged him to use his camera to expose how freedom and opportunity were denied to black people. Gordon took his best-known picture, titled “American Gothic, Washington, D.C.,” when he photographed one of the ladies on the cleaning staff holding her mop and broom in front of the American flag.
Excerpt from “Gordon Parks: Bigger Than Life” by Ann Parr from Cricket Magazine, February 2008. Text copyright © 2008 by Carus Publishing Company. Reprinted by permission of Cricket Media. All Cricket Media material is copyrighted by Carus Publishing d/b/a Cricket Media, and/or various authors and illustrators. Any commercial use or distribution of material without permission is strictly prohibited. Please visit http://www.cricketmedia.com/info/licensing2 for licensing and http://www.cricketmedia.com for subscriptions.
from HMH ONE Assessment bank