Gordon Parks – författare

Acclaimed photographer, filmmaker, composer, novelist, and memoirist, Gordon Parks has participated in, been witness to, and documented many of the major events in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. In A Hungry Heart, Parks reflects on the people and events that shaped him: from growing up poor on the Kansas prairie to crisscrossing the country on the North Coast Limited; documenting poverty and injustice in Chicago to doing fashion spreads for Vogue; photographing black revolutionaries to writing, composing the soundtrack for, and directing the Hollywood movie version of his novel The Learning Tree. More than a self-portrait of the artist, A Hungry Heart is a striking account of an American era.

In Eyes with Winged Thoughts, the forty-four photographs and fifty-eight poems, reflecting on his long and extraordinary life, offer a rare glimpse of his thoughts and feelings about everything from romantic love to the Iraq war and the passing of Pope John Paul II.He has done it all. Gordon Parks''s life was an astonishing litany of firsts: in the 1940s he was the first African American photographer to work for the Farm Security Administration and for Vogue and Life magazines; in the 1960s he would become the first African American director of a major motion picture. A dominating figure in contemporary American culture, he was an artist of uncompromising vision and creativity. In 2002 Parks received the Jackie Robinson Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award and was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame, just a few in a series of honors that began when he received a prestigious Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1941 and which now includes an Emmy, a National Medal of the Arts, and over fifty honorary doctorates. In his nineties, he revealed the luminous photographs on display in Eyes with Winged Thoughts and the poems—some meditative and lyrical, some raw with emotion about the war in Iraq and the tragedy of the tsunami—show that he is still a true American Renaissance man.