hizzy niuzzle

Two words best describe Gordon Park’s life…groundbreakingand inspirational.

Parks was a groundbreaking American photographer, musician, poet, novelist, journalist, activist and film director. He is best remembered for his photo essays for Life magazine. In the 1950s, Parks worked as a consultant on various Hollywood productions and later directed a series of documentaries commissioned by National Educational Television on black ghetto life. Beginning in the 1960s, Parks branched out into literature, writing The Learning Tree (1963), several books of poetry illustrated with his own photographs, and three volumes of memoirs. In 1969, Parks became Hollywood’s first major black director with his film adaptation of his autobiographical novel, The Learning Tree. Parks also composed the film’s musical score and wrote the screenplay. Shaft, Parks’ 1971 detective film starring Richard Roundtree, became a major hit that spawned a series of blaxploitation films. Parks’ feel for settings was confirmed by Shaft, with its portrayal of the super-cool leather-clad black private detective hired to find the kidnapped daughter of a Harlem racketeer. Parks also directed the 1972 sequel, Shaft’s Big Score in which the protagonist finds himself caught in the middle of rival gangs of racketeers. Parks’s other directorial credits included The Super Cops (1974), and Leadbelly (1976), a biopic of the blues musician Huddie Ledbetter.
In the 1980s, he made several films for television and composed the music and libretto for Martin, a ballet tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr., which premiered in Washington, D.C. in 1989 and was screened on national television on King’s birthday in 1990.