American photographer, filmmaker, musician, and writer; the most versatile Black American artist of the twentieth century and, through his quarter-century as a Life magazine staff photographer (1948–72), the person who did more than any other to bring the visual experience of Black American life — its beauty, its poverty, its political struggle, and its daily texture — before a white American mass audience that had rarely been asked to look.
Parks was born in Fort Scott, Kansas, the youngest of fifteen children in a farming family; his mother died when he was fourteen, and he was sent to live with a sister in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he was soon on his own. He worked as a busboy, piano player, and railroad dining-car waiter; bought a camera at a pawnshop after seeing Life magazine photographs of migrant workers; taught himself photography; and in 1942, on the strength of a portfolio submitted to the Farm Security Administration, was hired by Roy Stryker as the FSA's first Black photographer. His most famous FSA image, American Gothic (1942) — Ella Watson, a Black cleaning woman at the FSA building itself, posed with a mop and broom before an American flag in deliberate echo of Grant Wood — became one of the defining photographs of the American century.
At Life from 1948 to 1972, Parks produced photo-essays on subjects no other staff photographer had access to or interest in: a Harlem gang leader (The Restraints: Open and Hidden, 1956); the daily life of a Brazilian favela family (Flávio, 1961, which generated an international aid response); the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X; Muhammad Ali; Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panthers; the fashion world; and, throughout, the texture of Black poverty and aspiration in the urban North. His work at Life is an archive of mid-century Black American experience that has no equivalent.
Parks directed The Learning Tree (1969), the first major studio film directed by a Black American, adapted from his own autobiographical novel; and Shaft (1971), the detective film that launched the Blaxploitation genre and whose commercial success opened Hollywood to Black directors for the first time since Oscar Micheaux. He composed music (a piano concerto, a symphony, a ballet on the life of Martin Luther King Jr.), published several volumes of poetry, and wrote three memoirs — A Choice of Weapons (1966), Voices in the Mirror (1990), A Hungry Heart (2005) — that are themselves substantial contributions to Black American autobiography. He died in New York in 2006.
Parks is on the graph because his photography is the visual counterpart of the Black American literary tradition the graph weights heavily — Baldwin, Ellison, Hughes, Lawrence, Morrison — and because his FSA and Life work sits alongside Lange's as the photographic record of American poverty and inequality.