LJWorld.com

Wichita — The world-renown photographer has taken a new direction with his photography -- color abstractions.

Gordon Parks is not an easy man to describe -- not because he's terribly complex, but because he's done so much.

The hyphenated adjectives used to pinpoint most artists ("award-winning," "avant-garde") don't do the trick.

Photographer for Life magazine. Author of "The Learning Tree," and director of its movie version as well as the film "Shaft." Composer, poet, painter, lecturer, co-founder of Essence magazine, biographer, documentary maker.

He's an 86-year-old Renaissance man with silvery hair, whose shoulders become broader under the weight of his cameras, whose heart lives among the shadows in his photographs, whose mind remains as quick as a Kansas skink.

He is perhaps this century's clarion of creative curiosity. And yet he seems genuinely modest about his success and the influence he's had on the world.

"There's no genius to it," he said recently during a town hall meeting with Wichita high school students. "My mother died when I was 15 and I was sent to Minnesota to live, and I was kicked out because my brother-in-law didn't like kids. It was a matter of survival rather than any genius.

"" You have to know that you can do things that people will never expect you to do. I have faith in myself. I wrote a novel that became a best seller, and I didn't know I could write."

A retrospective of Parks' career and life opened recently at the Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art on the Wichita State University campus. The 219-piece exhibition, which is touring to 15 venues in the United States before going to Europe and Japan, was organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

"He's really Everyman, you know," Michael Kan, curator of African, Oceanic and New World cultures at the Detroit Institute of Arts, said in February when the exhibition opened there.

"The remarkable thing about him is that he fits the image of everything any man aspires to be. He's the prototypical adventurer: He goes to places that nobody else goes to and is able to come out with something that speaks to the essence of these experiences."

All that from a boy whose parents -- Jackson and Sarah Parks -- were dirt poor farmers in Fort Scott and scratched together barely enough food to feed their 15 children.

Humble beginnings

The story -- whether fact or fiction -- is that on Nov. 30, 1912, the Parks' youngest child was born dead and brought back to life when Dr. Gordon dipped him into cold water. Hence, the baby's first name. Hence, the belief he was destined to live a full life.

Jackson Parks was a quiet man who instilled a sense of self-reliance in his children.

"My dad didn't say 20,000 words to me in his lifetime," his son said, "but they were very important to me."

His mother, he said, "taught him nothing but love."

Life was hard in segregated Fort Scott, where black students were told not to waste their families' money by going to college and where black athletes could not participate on the high school's teams.

Parks said he could have turned that discrimination into hate, but his mother taught him to do otherwise.

"One of my friends was a white boy, Waldo. (My mother took him) into our home for four months because he didn't have a home. That was the kind of things that straightened me out."

The compassion and empathy Parks learned from his mother surfaces in his photo essays, where the people in front of his camera are always more important than the one behind it.

Parks first made his mark in 1942 when he shot a photo series on bigotry in the nation's capital for the Farm Security Administration. He focused his lens on Ella Watson, a charwoman who worked in the Capitol.

"You can't photograph a bigot " You have to get into the social bigotry with your camera. (Roy Emerson Stryder, the head of the Farm Security Administration) had left the office. Ella was there and I asked her about her life. Her grandfather had been lynched in the South. Her daughter had died in childbirth and she raised two other children on her salary. I thought of Grant Wood's 'American Gothic.' When I showed (the photograph) to Stryder, he said it was the right idea but it would get us all fired."

Parks continued to use the technique of telling a story by photographing the effects on one family during his 22-year stint with Life magazine. The Willie Causey family of Shady Grove, Ala., helped him expose segregation in the Deep South. Adolescent Flavio da Silva and his family made the slums of Rio de Janiero in Brazil real to middle-class America.

Finding life's beauty

While he is best known for his photo essays dealing with socio-political concerns and his portraits of such notable African Americans as Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali and Langston Hughes, Parks also was driven by the need to savor a world of expressive beauty and art. Thus sprang forth his poetry, concertos, sonatas and ballet -- and a new direction in photography.

His most recent photos are color abstractions that appear to be the result of as much computer manipulation as skillful shooting. In reality, he paints a backdrop, places objects in front of it, arranges a couple of lights and shoots.

"It represents an internal examination as well as visual art," Philip Brookman, curator of photography and media arts at the Corcoran Gallery, said.

These days, Parks often speaks about the shortness of life. He realizes how easy some people of his age fall into depression.

"I wake up in the morning and I can go to the computer and write poetry. I can go to the window and take photos. I can go to the piano and compose a tune," he said. "Every now and then, depression creeps in and I can destroy it in five seconds by writing poetry."

The truth is, he has no time for depression. He recently finished writing a biography on J.M. Turner, an 18th-century painter, and is considering making the book into a movie. He recently was asked to contribute to a film project on the life of politician Adam Clayton Powell.

Parks said he doesn't understand why his life has taken the route it has. He doesn't believe in luck, but he does describe himself as a man of faith.

"I could have been a scientist, a lawyer, a banker," he said, "(but) I wouldn't have had half as exciting life as I've had with the one I was granted by Providence."

-- Jan Biles' phone message number is 832-7146. Her e-mail address is jbiles@ljworld.com.