Gordon Parks

“I have never gloried at being the first black photographer to enter those closed doors at Life magazine, Vogue or any of the other places. I like to feel they were opened for my race as well as me. I did realize that I making fresh tracks, but I never carried the responsibility around on my back like a sack of stones. I simply did my best without asking favors because I was black. Time and time again those tracks have been filled, and this is reason to rejoice.”

These words were written by Gordon Parks (1912–2006) in the third of his four autobiographies, Voices in the Mirror, published in 1990. He was the first African-American to join the staffs of Life and Voguemagazines, and the first to direct a major Hollywood film. But breaking racial barriers was only part of his story. As a child growing up in rural Kansas, he suffered extreme poverty and racism. On his own at 15, he played piano in a Minnesota brothel, cleaned up in a Chicago flophouse, worked as a railway porter and played semi-pro baseball. He discovered photography at 25, and demonstrated a quick and lasting love with the medium. Sensitive photos of Chicago’s rugged South Side earned him the first Julius Rosenwald Fellowship and work as a Farm Security Administration photographer alongside Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. Parks went to work for Life in 1949, and for the next two decades produced eloquent and hard-hitting photo essays on poverty, racial segregation, and civil rights leaders Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. He also excelled at sports, fashion and portrait photography. His restless creative spirit eventually led him to Hollywood, where he made history with the groundbreaking films The Learning Tree (1969), Shaft (1971) and Leadbelly (1976).

References:-

Book:- Voices in the Mirror: An Autobiography

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Parks