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BBC NARRATOR: He is a famous photographer,
the only Negro cameraman on LIFE magazine.
He's a composer, an author, and a film director.
Among his friends in the world of liberal arts,
he's a success in his own right, accepted on that basis.
But he is still a Negro living in America.
Not every White American has heard
of the famous Gordon Parks.
When I walked into LIFE magazine, that uh,
18 years ago...
You see, a Negro-- Put it like this.
A Negro builds up a double defense.
When you are a kid, you have to prepare
to be able to do much more than a White boy,
so that if the time comes
where your talent is pitted against a White man,
you will get the nod because they can't afford to lose you.
The term, "living in a White man's world"
is one I don't particularly like.
A lot of Negroes use it, a lot of Whites use it.
But I consider this my world.
♪ ("THIS WORLD" BY CHARLES BRADLEY PLAYING) ♪
♪ This world Is going up in flames ♪
♪ And nobody Wanna take the blame ♪
BLM PROTESTERS: Hands up! Don't shoot! Hands up! Don't shoot!
♪ Don't tell me How to live my life ♪
♪ When you Never felt the pain ♪
♪ Oh, oh, oh ♪
♪ Ooh! They don't hear me cry ♪
♪ Ooh! Oh, it's killing me ♪
♪ A better world, oh baby! ♪
♪ Gotta make it baby Gotta make it right ♪
♪ Baby! Oh! ♪
♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
(POLICE SIREN WAILING)
COACH: Let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go.
DEVIN ALLEN: I only can imagine if Gordon Parks was alive now.
What he would be able to do.
You know, to talk about these serious issues.
Always something going on around here. (CHUCKLES)
There you go, shorty.
I had to make a lot of mistakes, you know,
to get to where I am now.
♪ (DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYS) ♪
ALLEN: I was hustling, and I was in the streets.
I lost like my first friend at like 16, 17,
due to gun violence, and that kind of, like, changed my world.
I wanted to really pursue art.
So I would go to Barnes & Noble,
and just, like, have all these photography books out.
And I just would, like, sit and look at Gordon's work,
if it was him shooting his stuff in Harlem.
The story, the gang--
that's still going on to this day.
I was like, "So I can shoot all these things too.
I'ma get me a camera."
So it started off as just a personal journey...
(PROTESTORS CHANTING)
...but as I got deep into my career,
that's when I really started realizing
how powerful an image can be.
'Cause my career is literally built on
the broken back of Freddie Gray.
REPORTER: The 25-year-old falls into a coma
at shock trauma and dies seven days later.
PROTESTERS: Freddie! Freddie! Freddie!
ALLEN: I knew how my city was,
and the energy that was, like, kinda vibrating.
So I just took to the streets.
PROTESTERS: No justice, no peace! No racist police!
ALLEN: When everything really hit the fan
is when we were down in Camden Yards,
and all the police were worried about the fact
that we had an Orioles game.
Some fans at the bars were actually calling us the N-word,
they were calling us monkeys.
And that's what actually started everything.
(CROWD SCREAMING)
(GLASS SMASHING)
ALLEN: And this guy runs past, and he throws something,
and I just snapped the picture. I don't think nothing of it.
I remember just uploading the image
while all of this was going on, saying, "We're sick and tired."
And around that time, I get like
a blocked call come through, and he is like,
"This is Olivier from TIME magazine.
I wanted to talk to Devin Allen about his work in Baltimore.
What publication are you with?"
I'm like, "I'm not with no publication."
And I told them my story, and we did a blog from it.
I go to sleep. I wake up,
and I just see all these, like, tweets. And it says,
"Amateur photographer from West Baltimore
snags the cover of TIME magazine."
And I just burst out in tears, and I call my mother,
and she burst out in tears,
and my whole family is just crying.
For the first time, I understood what Gordon was talking about,
that the camera is a real weapon,
and I realized how powerful I am with a camera in my hand.
♪ (SOFT JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
GORDON PARKS: I might have turned eventually
to the gun or the knife as a weapon to survive,
but by then I had chosen the camera.
Photography was the way in which I could express my own feelings
about racism in America,
about the downtrodden.
And somehow or another, I might
transcend my own experience.
I live off of my emotions, perhaps, you know.
And so I had turned those emotions
into some mercenary thing, by which I could survive.
♪ (MUSIC CONTINUES) ♪
BRYAN STEVENSON: What distinguishes Gordon Parks
from a lot of other artists is that he had
a quintessentially authentic Black experience.
I mean, he was the child of Black people
who had fled enslavement.
Growing up in Kansas,
to be proximate to lynching and racial terrorism,
to understand the weight
that people of color felt in these spaces
where you had to basically be two people.
One person around White people
that would keep you safe,
and another person with your family.
I think just gave him an insight to the Black narrative.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
Boy, they sure are having a good ol' time
over there at that crap game.
PARKS: Kansas itself offered you freedom on one hand,
and on the other hand, it was trying to take it away from you.
Tuck! Tuck! Kirky's coming!
♪ (TENSE MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
Run, Tuck, run!
KIRKY: Stop damn it, I'll shoot!
(GUNSHOT)
♪ (TENSE MUSIC CONTINUES) ♪
PARKS: Four or five of my closest friends
had died through violence.
About four people were shot to death.
My mother wanted me out of there.
She knew it was a dangerous place for me to live.
PHILIP BROOKMAN: Gordon lived a wandering life as a young person.
He gets a job as a waiter
on the dining car of the Northern Pacific.
PARKS: I had great expectations, you know.
I thought I was going to conquer a new world.
He had to go through getting kicked off of the trains.
He had to go through hanging out with the bums.
He had to go through all these different forms of life,
but when you're traveling around the world
and you're in a place where you've never been before,
the first thing that you have to do is observe.
And the more you observe,
the more you understand what's going on around you.
JAMEL SHABAZZ: He would ride the trains and pick up the magazines,
and look at imagery and be informed behind that.
Having an opportunity to go to different cities,
under some really harsh conditions,
just to survive and being amongst the filth
and the drunkenness and addiction.
Luckily for him, he was able to get that camera.
BROOKMAN: He's teaching himself photography
by reading, uh, training manuals.
His studio was the kitchen of his home,
and his lights were made from tin cans.
That's how Gordon Parks started out, you know,
making pictures and then selling them to the newspaper.
♪ (JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
STEVENSON: When Black photographers began
capturing African American life,
it created a new relationship
for Black people to their own identity.
When Gordon Parks came along, he found value and interest
and art in the lives of ordinary people.
AVA DUVERNAY: At a time and in a society
where Black people were told far too often
that we're criminals, that we're ugly,
that we're less worthy
to have the spotlight on us for any reason,
Gordon put a lens and a light on us for ourselves.
And allowed us to see the elegance of the lives
that we live and the places where we are.
♪ (JAZZ MUSIC CONTINUES) ♪
BROOKMAN: In January 1942, Parks receives word
that he's been awarded a fellowship
to work for a year at
the Farm Security Administration in Washington.
The purpose of the FSA was to resettle American farmers
who had lost their land during the Dust Bowl.
♪ (SOMBER MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
BROOKMAN: It set up a unit of photographers and filmmakers
who could help to document what they were doing.
It was run by a man by the name of Roy Stryker.
MICHAL RAZ-RUSSO: Many of the photographers who shot for
the Farm Security Administration become heroes for Gordon Parks,
and he's really interested in the process and their approach.
And so his idea is, "Let me go out there,
and let me mentor under Roy Stryker."
PARKS: He was the one who taught me
that when you are doing a story,
it's not for you to accept the people,
but the people to accept you.
Because you are going into their presence,
asking them to help you.
BROOKMAN: Roy Stryker actually introduces Gordon Parks
to the cleaning woman,
who cleans the offices in the Agriculture Department.
A woman by the name of Ella Watson.
He photographs her at work,
sweeping floors, cleaning the offices.
In one office, there's an American flag
hanging on the wall.
LONNIE BUNCH: Here is a woman
who in some ways is the backbone of America...
yet she is standing in front of a flag,
in front of an America that didn't believe in her.
SPIKE LEE: Gordon Parks is one of my heroes.
Ella Watson.
This photograph, to me, talks about
how our ancestors,
from 1619,
when that first slave ship hit Jamestown, Virginia.
We have fought and died for this country.
We have loved this country, but the love has not been returned.
That's what this photograph says to me.
Then I thought of Grant Wood and American Gothic.
I said, "Take this broom in one hand,
take this mop in the other,
and stand before that American flag."
I blew it up the next morning,
put it on Stryker's desk, and he nearly fainted.
He said, "Oh my God, you're going to get us all fired."
LATOYA RUBY FRAZIER: She's standing in front of the American flag...
in a society, a nation, and a government
that doesn't recognize her as a full human being.
PARKS: I made a very innocent, bold, outrageous statement.
FRAZIER: You know, it reminds me of the Malcolm X quote,
"The most hated, the most mistreated,
and the most abused person in America is the Black woman."
There it is right there, written on her face.
♪ (SOMBER MUSIC FADES) ♪
BROOKMAN: Parks continues to photograph Ella Watson.
♪ (WHIMSICAL MUSIC PLAYS) ♪
BROOKMAN: He worked with her for a period of weeks.
He photographs her at church, he photographs her neighborhood.
There is one amazing photograph
that he makes of Ella Watson at home.
The photograph is divided right down the middle,
and you see Ella Watson on the left side,
helping to feed one of the young kids.
On the right side of the picture there is a mirror,
and her adopted daughter is reflected in the mirror.
You can see, also a photograph,
it's a photograph of Ella Watson's parents.
So you're actually seeing four generations of this family,
all in one photograph
that's composed in a very sophisticated way.
RAZ-RUSSO: That's the turning point for him.
It's there, through this project,
that he understands how important it is
to get to know his subject.
To really try and depict the humanity
of the subjects that he is photographing.
♪ (MUSIC CONTINUES) ♪
-(CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS) -(BIRDS CHIRPING)
MR. SMILEY: This is his way of holding on to me,
and I don't spend enough time with him. (CHUCKLES)
He says, "I got you now, can't go nowhere." (CHUCKLES)
-FRAZIER: "What do you mean?" -MR. SMILEY: Yeah, what you been doing?
Leave me out here all by myself.
FRAZIER: Look this way, Mr. Smiley.
When I read Gordon's autobiography, A Choice of Weapons,
I mean, everything that he went through
to define himself on his own terms
and to say with the camera,
"This is how I am going to make my mark and change
all the things that I don't like about America, right."
It stays with me because I grew up
living in a dilapidated house next to the railroad
in an industrial small town,
watching everyone kind of disappear and the city shrink
and have all our basic human rights stripped from us.
♪ (SOMBER MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
FRAZIER: I found the ability to cope and move forward through art.
Right, it started out being drawings and paintings
and then eventually moving into photography.
Those photographs are what enabled me
to save my own life.
In 2016, I was commissioned by ELLE magazine
and Hearst Corporation to produce a photo essay
about the Flint water crisis.
REPORTER 1: It's not safe to drink the water in Flint, Michigan.
REPORTER 2: Flint disconnected its water supply through Detroit
and began drawing water from the Flint River instead.
REPORTER 3: Highly corrosive river water flowed through the city's lead pipes,
leaching lead into the water supply.
FRAZIER: That's how Shea Cobb and I met
and how I've built this very robust friendship.
It was for several months that I was photographing Shea
and her eight-year-old daughter, Zion.
And Shea was faced with having to decide
to protect her daughter's health,
and the issue with lead is, in an eight-year-old child,
it's going to leach into their brain.
It couldn't have been more than a week
that I was photographing Shea in Flint.
She said her father sent her something.
And it's a picture of her at the age of 12,
taking her first sip of water from a freshwater spring
on the land where her father lives in Mississippi,
with a message that said,
"This water won't kill you. Come home."
And so she makes the decision to leave her mother
and make the reverse migration back to the South,
where her father lives,
on land that his family has always owned.
Oh wow! He's gotten so much bigger.
This is the one that I was seeing that was a baby?
When I started doing karate moves, like to practice, he thinks he can do it,
so he holds onto stuff and then fell flat on his butt.
FRAZIER: So I returned to Mississippi
to continue a body of work
that I'm committed to with Shea Cobb,
her daughter Zion, who's now 12,
and Shea's father, Mr. Doug Smiley.
MR. SMILEY: Thank you, Lord, for this food and all of our many blessings.
-Thank you. -ALL: Amen.
FRAZIER: And so it was a tumultuous time to enter into Shea's life,
and she didn't have to trust me,
but I think it goes back to Gordon.
You need to be present
and talk to people for as long as it takes.
I get to know the person that is the main subject of the work,
and I learn to empathize...
and also allow their feelings to guide me through
the landscape that they inhabit.
This was, you know, a real lesson
about not only empathizing
but listening and taking the instructions and allowing the images
to be authored by someone else.
Like, that's a real collaboration.
And I also knew to take those cues
because I had been closely looking at Ralph Ellison
and Gordon Parks's collaboration in the late '40s.
♪ (UPBEAT JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
PARKS: Ralph Ellison wrote Invisible Man.
I did a story on the need of psychiatric treatment in Harlem.
Ellison actually writes a manifesto
for Gordon Parks titled the "Pictorial Problem."
He wants the photographs to function
as both document and symbol.
And this phrase becomes a kind of guiding principle
for Gordon Parks's entire career.
This idea that photographs can transcend what is just being depicted.
FRAZIER: Ellison details a list of certain kinds of images
that he would like Parks to make.
Images that psychologically impact the viewer.
The feeling of a place
and the feeling of being robbed and dehumanized...
in an undulating poetic visual way.
RAZ-RUSSO: Later in 1952, Parks approaches Ralph Ellison.
Ellison had just published Invisible Man,
and he says, "Let's create another collaboration
to celebrate the publication."
They go out on the streets once again and they create photographs
that represent nearly every single scene in the book.
LEE: This picture could have been taken during slavery.
We're all tryna watch out
for the motherfuckin' slave catchers.
And my brother here ran off the plantation.
And he's running for his life.
♪ (UPBEAT JAZZ MUSIC FADES) ♪
Parks takes the portfolio of images that he shot
for his collaboration with Ralph Ellison in 1948
to LIFE magazine,
to pitch them a story about a Harlem gang leader.
BUNCH: LIFE magazine was the Bible.
People read the newspapers, listened to the radio.
But for many people, it really was LIFE magazine that helped them understand
what was going on in America.
PARKS: I met the picture editor,
who offered me the great sum of 500 dollars
to do the Harlem gang story.
When I walked out of there, I was frightened.
How do you walk in and ask the gang leader to let me photograph your life
when he's hiding from the police?
I used the broad approach
when I first went up to the police precinct
and asked one of the detectives if they knew such a gang leader.
And they said, "Yeah, we know plenty of them,
but none of them gonna let you photograph them."
While I was in the precinct, a young man walked in,
and he literally cursed the desk sergeant out about something.
And so I said to my detective friend, "Who is that guy?"
He said, "That is the most notorious gang leader in all of Harlem."
His name was Red Jackson.
I told him I was from LIFE magazine.
I want to do a story on him, very bluntly, you know.
That's the way I got into that story.
I didn't take pictures in the beginning.
I just sort of sat with them on the stoop in Harlem
in the hot summer days and listened to their talk.
♪ (SOFT JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
PARKS: So one day he just said,
"When are you going to use your camera?"
I said, "Oh, you know, anytime something happens."
This is like what he learned from the Farm Security Administration project
he does with Ella Watson.
He knows that he has to get to know somebody really well
and spend time with them.
Red was a little apprehensive,
but they built this great bond with each other,
and Gordon recognized his leadership ability,
and they developed a really unique relationship.
PARKS: I stayed with his gang about three months.
MAURICE BERGER: He photographed Red in his everyday life.
Being with his mother in the kitchen cooking,
washing the dishes,
sitting with his brother while his brother was reading.
RAZ-RUSSO: His goal was to create a story
from an insider point of view.
BUNCH: He added levels of complexity
and levels of understanding, that you might not have gotten in other photography.
No one's a gangster 24 hours a day.
Everyone who is a gangster has a family.
BROOKMAN: He also photographs him out on the streets...
with members of his gang.
He photographs fights and violence.
So it's a really interesting look at the life of a young,
you know, gang leader.
PARKS: Two boys were killed while I was with him.
There's one picture in the LIFE story of Herbie lying in his coffin.
He'd been stabbed in the neck and parts of his head.
And Red picked Herbie's head up and felt the wounds,
and said, "We're going to do the same thing to them."
SHABAZZ: I think that Gordon saw himself in Red Jackson.
Because if Gordon didn't pick up the camera,
he could have easily been Red Jackson.
He just saw a young man that had a lot of potential.
He was a leader. He saw he didn't have a father.
At the same time, trying to show him in a light
that will illuminate some of the problems that existed in Harlem
in regards to poverty and gang warfare and injustice.
SHABAZZ: How y'all feeling today?
I like that outfit there, young man.
Can I borrow that jacket? Wow, I like that haircut too, troop.
Who hooked you up? All right, here we go.
I'm gonna say showtime, and let's do it.
You guys are ready?
'Cause I think you guys are gonna be famous.
All right, here we go. Ready?
-All right, look at me. I think you guys got it. -(CAMERA CLICKING)
Gordon spoke about the power of photography and imagery
and how you could use the camera as a weapon.
It's through the photography that I want to really express myself.
That gave me a voice 'cause prior to that I was lost.
I fell victim to the streets, but once I picked up the camera,
it became my compass.
I have a tool that I can use,
not only to document the community
but to save lives at the same time.
Gordon spoke about the 35 millimeter
and how it could be a more effective weapon.
And that really resonated with me
because I grew up in a gun culture,
you know with the nine millimeters.
It was the empathy that he had for his subjects
that I thought was really powerful.
You had Red Jackson, his difficult life coming up.
Gordon just wanted to be like a mentor and a guide.
I spent 20 years in the Department of Corrections.
When the opportunity came to work on Rikers Island,
I accepted it as my new assignment.
NEWS REPORTER: Crack is causing an increase in murder and other violent crime.
SHABAZZ: This is right around the same time
that the crack epidemic hit.
So now I'm in this space,
and I'm seeing the impact of drugs
and the lack of rehabilitation.
I'm taking my camera to the job every day.
I'm documenting the world inside.
I'm witnessing brutality and hatred.
I felt it was my responsibility to talk to young people
about what was going on
because a lot of young men were dying
at the hands of other young men.
And I was very troubled by what I was seeing.
So I would place myself in different positions
where young people would be at, and I would approach them.
If I saw a group, I would look at the leader and say,
"You know, with all due respect, I'm a photographer,
when I look at you, I see greatness.
If you don't mind, I'd like to take a photograph
of you and your crew."
And then I would start posing them.
And then they would create poses.
and the poses gave it life.
♪ (JOYFUL MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
SHABAZZ: Once the film roll was completed, I would put the film in the shop,
I would come back in an hour, and I would go back to the location,
I would give out prints.
It let them know that they weren't invisible.
As kids, we could just tear each other down.
I use the camera to build people up
and let people feel special.
A lot of them were really receptive
to hearing what I was saying 'cause I'm speaking in real time.
Just a few hours ago, I was on Rikers Island,
and I witnessed, you know, people getting stabbed
and individuals that thought that they can handle it,
and they couldn't. And they would listen.
So I was trying to encourage them to be better. You know, I didn't want to see
no more of these young men incarcerated.
♪ (JOYFUL MUSIC FADES) ♪
I owe a lot of where I'm at right now to Gordon
because we didn't have a lot of Black photographers to mirror,
you know, when I was coming up. Gordon was that pathfinder.
NARRATOR: LIFE magazine is the headquarters
for photographer Gordon Parks
on the staff of the popular
pictorial news magazine since 1949.
And a man who stands at the top of his profession.
BROOKMAN: Because of the success of
"Harlem Gang Leader", Parks was hired onto the staff
as the first African American photographer at LIFE,
which was a really big deal.
This was entry into the media that was seen internationally.
NARRATOR: Parks's work is amongst the finest in a magazine,
noted for photographic excellence.
BERGER: By the mid-1950s, Parks had already become,
for want of a better word, very established.
JELANI COBB: He really does have that internally solid
perseverance kind of quality to him.
PARKS: I've tried to use the camera
to sort of correct the things that
I experienced as a young Black man coming up in America.
COBB: And then with all that
Black people were confronting at that point,
it requires a great deal of temerity
to say that you're going to change that with your camera.
BERGER: In 1956, LIFE sent Gordon to Alabama
to do a story about segregation in the Jim Crow South.
KHALIL MUHAMMAD: Dispatches coming out of the south
are the usual reporting on racial violence.
COBB: In 1955, just months before
Gordon Parks traveled to Alabama,
Emmett Till was brutally tortured and killed
in Money, Mississippi.
If the death of my son can mean something
to the other unfortunate people all over the world,
then for him to have died a hero
would mean more to me than for him just to have died.
COBB: His mother Mamie allowed Jet magazine to publish
the images of his defiled, desecrated body.
I saw Emmett Till's photograph in Jet magazine.
I'll never forget it.
I still get very emotional.
I was eight years old when Emmett Till was murdered
and I didn't... I-- Wh-- What--
What was that all about? I couldn't understand it.
COBB: That photograph was really evidence
of what could happen to you
as a Black person in the deep South,
and that was the world that Gordon Parks
was stepping into in 1956.
Gordon liked to embody whatever subject
he had been asked by his editors
to represent in a family.
Because he knew that the readers of LIFE magazine
would be innately sympathetic to the circumstances of a child,
of a family, and of a community.
Those photographs had tremendous impact
partly because of the color.
At that time, a searing photo essay in the pages of LIFE
was practically expected to be in black and white.
STEVENSON: He wanted that color to implicate people seeing this,
so that they would understand this is your America right now.
People were told that segregation was benign.
It's okay, Black people want it.
That's not what you see
when you see his images and the hurt and the exclusion
that these families present.
These children are literally excluded by this fence
that they cannot pass.
STEVENSON: Even from behind,
he's able to convey their sense of longing
to be able to go into that space.
ALLEN: He can take something that's so negative,
but when you first digest it and look at it,
before you start to unpack everything,
it's like super warm, and it just like blows you away.
I think he was really good at even things
that might have been
uncomfortable for, as a Black person to capture
but he has this thing where the way he frames stuff,
it draws you in, and it makes you wanna have a conversation.
There's an elegance. Even, there's an elegance,
even to his depictions of evil, basically.
DUVERNAY: It's her dress that does it for me
and the earring, and the purse, and the perfectly matched shoes.
She's a queen,
and yet she has to have a separate entrance
from the White woman in the red dress
that's further down the street.
BERGER: Mrs. Joanne Wilson was walking with her young niece
by a segregated movie theatre,
and the little girl smelled popcorn.
I interviewed Mrs. Wilson 60 years after that photograph was taken.
And she said, "I was feeling a sense of almost panic of what to do.
I wasn't going to take my niece
into a segregated back entrance. I wouldn't do it."
So I asked Mrs. Wilson
about the experience of the shoot,
and I said, "Was there anything about it that upset you
or bothered you?" and she said,
and she loved Gordon,
and she said, "Yes.
When I looked at the photograph, I realized that
the strap of my slip had fallen.
I was a proud Black woman in Alabama,
and I never left my house not being dressed perfectly."
I understand how she felt,
but I don't think that Gordon would have told her
to adjust the strap because for him
it represented something remarkable.
She was distracted.
You cannot be a mother or even human
and not see that little moment of drama in a photograph
and not feel a sense of affiliation with Mrs. Wilson.
DARREN WALKER: Gordon Parks's photography demanded
that America look at itself.
His work did what art does at its very best.
It makes the viewer engage deeply in the subject.
And to see narratives about life,
about our history.
So when you look at those beautiful photographs,
what you saw was dignity
in the face of remarkable discrimination and bigotry.
♪ (MELANCHOLIC MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
And rising...
You got to wait for him to rise, folks.
Okay, now rise behind him. You got to look for him.
One of the things about Mr. Parks
that had been really inspiring and informative
is the idea that if I pick up my camera,
I can say something and show something,
and that I will be heard,
and that it will be seen, and a story will be told.
Action!
And that my camera gives me the power to do that.
To think of the camera as a weapon is a strong way
to think about it and something that I have come to embrace.
Some of my favorite work of his is in color.
There's something about the color that feels very painterly
in a way that's different from the black and white.
I remember looking at those photos, and I look at them often.
They inform, even choices that I make in cinematography
for my films.
There's a photo that I love.
It's a little boy sitting in a field,
and he has an "X" on his head
that's like a target.
That image just says so much.
The rest, the relaxation, the intimacy,
juxtaposed against the poverty.
We think of photography, I think,
as like a solitary art practice.
It's the photographer and their camera,
but really, they're in relationship with their subject.
When I look at his work, I think, "God! How'd he get that?"
The ease and the intimacy
that comes through in so much of his work.
The process with actors is you're trying to achieve
the same ends of intimacy, of a connection...
Action!
...of an understanding of the material and each other,
so that you can get to those true places.
Pent up emotions and inattention
would have led to an uncontrollable,
retaliatory situation.
Well done. We're good. Looking good. Thank you.
DUVERNAY: The thing for Black filmmakers is
for far too long we've been relegated to
one set of tools, if any.
One of the things about Mr. Parks is the ability
to work within many boxes and to use many tools.
♪ (CALM MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
RAZ-RUSSO: If one were to look at the entirety
of Gordon Parks's career,
you would be struck by the range of work that he did.
It's absolutely fascinating how he's able to bounce around
from photojournalism to fashion photography,
to portraiture, to abstraction, and everything in between.
And yet somehow, it's all tied together by his approach,
the idea that he's fully invested
in every single one of his subjects.
NELSON GEORGE: His whole thing was to be there
and have a point of view. Definitely had a point of view
about Black liberation, Black freedom,
White oppression, uh, fashion.
But not to impose that in the environment,
to be able to be there
and find those moments where, "Boom, boom, boom."
My mom and Gordon Parks met
on a photo shoot for LIFE magazine.
She was gonna be in a play called The Swan
and Gordon was the photographer assigned to it.
They just instantly sort of clicked.
My mom, I mean, you couldn't have more different circumstances,
she grew up obviously surrounded by great wealth.
She said that this was the first African American person
she really became friends with.
I think they did connect as artists.
That was the beginning of what would become
this extraordinary lifelong friendship.
I always knew there was more to their relationship
than he was just a family friend
who would spend weekends out in Long Island with us.
But I knew Gordon's work
from the time I was a kid. I followed it.
He had the ability to tell other people's stories
and the ability to enmesh yourself in somebody else's life
and to document it.
I just found that amazing.
GEORGE: Gordon was this guy who could connect with all of these people,
and not necessarily be everyone's best friend,
but gain respect enough to move in their spaces.
As a photographer, and I learned myself as a journalist,
the ability to be there and be present
but not to interfere.
To be able to sit back,
let it happen, observe closely what's going on,
and find out what's interesting about it.
He had that ability, and it comes through
in all of his photography.
♪ (MELLOW JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
BERGER: In 1957, LIFE sent Gordon
to photograph the American crime crisis.
♪ (JAZZ MUSIC CONTINUES) ♪
He represented crime as an ambiguity.
It deracialized the story of crime.
There were White criminals. There were Black criminals.
He also showed the humanity around crime.
STEVENSON: It challenges this notion
that a criminal is someone who is
entirely loathsome, entirely evil.
There's an incredible photograph of a prison cell.
You see a hand leaning over one of the bars with a cigarette,
but on the bottom, you see the hand grabbing the bar.
What you see is the anxiety
of the person behind bars.
ALLEN: Gordon was able to tell both sides of the story.
Being able to go into a police station
and shooting from that perspective.
As an artist, we are the medium between opposing sides,
and we are the only ones that can actually
create that narrative to even start a conversation.
♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
STEVENSON: You cannot be a person of color
growing up in the urban north
and not be mindful of the way in which
police officers were symbols.
They represented threat and menace.
My cousins lived in North Philadelphia,
and when we would go spend time with them,
there was a completely foreign environment.
And my cousin would say,
"If you see a gang coming down one street
and you see the police coming down another street,
both of them are dangerous,
but run toward the gang, not toward the police."
And it wasn't because people didn't want law and order.
They did. They just didn't want it imposed through abuse.
♪ (SOMBER MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
STEVENSON: And Parks got it, you know, in the images presented.
That image where he shows those police officers
crashing down a door, gun in hand.
There's a kind of violence.
Can you imagine being on the other side of this door?
So it's a really powerful image to contradict this idea
that these are the people who make us safe.
You know, I see this and I think,
"Keep me as far away from these guys as possible."
♪ (SOMBER MUSIC FADES) ♪
STEVENSON: Using the rule of law is certainly a way
to fight against inequality and injustice.
But I have recognized that that's not enough.
Now I see myself very much engaged in...
in narrative work and using narrative tools
to fight against inequality and injustice,
and that's the reason why it makes perfect sense to us
to build a museum.
The primary goal is to tell a story about our history
that shakes people sufficiently.
You're motivated to say, "Never again"
to racial bigotry and bias.
Gordon Parks became central
to the way we wanted to talk about our imagery
and storytelling through photography.
Narrative work is how Parks changed hearts and minds.
You can change laws,
but if you don't, kind of, work on people
and the psychology behind bigotry and exclusion,
then you're not gonna make any progress.
And Parks understood early that he had a role to play
if we were gonna kind of shape the things
that people believe about equality.
You know, as a photographer for LIFE,
you look at publications like that.
And in this very subtle way, this notion of
who is an American was being reinforced.
Week after week, month after month.
♪ (MELANCHOLIC MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
STEVENSON: And so Parks's images really disrupted that.
If you had to see this Black family
in one of his photos
juxtaposed with these White families
in these ads,
it caused you to kind of think just a little differently.
It raised questions about who is an American.
Gordon Parks was often criticized
as much as he was applauded
for his position at LIFE magazine,
and he was very aware of being in a conflicted position.
He talks about how he was seen as often going in
as LIFE's, quote, "Black photographer,"
and creating stories that were meant to appeal
to a White audience.
At the same time, he understood that
when he was covering stories that had to do with race,
that he was in a unique position
to tell those stories from his point of view.
And a great example of that was in 1963, when he was sent
to do a story about the Nation of Islam.
MALCOLM X: America is a White man's country.
A country that was stolen by the White man
from the dark-skinned Indians,
who then kidnapped our people and brought us here in chains.
PARKS: I saw Malcolm for the very first time in person
on the corner of 125th Street and 7th Avenue.
MALCOLM: There's no such thing as justice in this country
for a Black man.
And there's no such thing as equality in this country
for a Black man.
This is a White man's country!
PARKS: The first thing I asked him was about the possibility
of my covering the Black Muslims.
And he said, "Well, the honorable Elijah Muhammad
would have to decide that."
Malcolm and I flew to Phoenix, Arizona.
The first thing Elijah Muhammad said to me was,
"Why are you working for the White devils?"
I said, "Well, you know, you've heard of
getting behind the iron horse
and finding out what's going on?"
He said, "I don't buy that."
(LAUGHS)
Well, in any case, he said, "We'll give you a try.
Brother Malcolm is gonna escort you through
the world of Islam, and if I like what you do,
I'll send you a big box of cigars.
If I don't like what you do, we'll be out to visit you."
(LAUGHS)
And that's the way Malcolm and I got started.
MALCOLM: In the name of Allah, the beneficent, the merciful,
to whom all praise is due.
Whom we forever thank for giving us
the honorable Elijah Muhammad
as our leader, teacher, and guide.
PARKS: I found in the mosques such order,
uniformity in just about everything.
Malcolm would walk with a long stick
and point to a blackboard and explain what Elijah Muhammad
expected of Muslims.
I was surprised to see them training German Shepherd dogs.
Malcolm would look at me and smile.
He says, "If they can face that dog
with its vicious fangs,
they can face a lot of other things."
I went into some of the Muslim families.
I asked one father in Brooklyn,
I said, "Suppose your son came home one day
and told you that he was renouncing the Muslim religion."
He said, "I would turn him from my door
and would never allow him in again."
It was amazing, the faith that they had
in Elijah Muhammad and in Malcolm.
RAZ-RUSSO: Gordon Parks spends several months
with members of the Nation of Islam.
It becomes a true collaboration
where Gordon Parks is allowed unprecedented access.
I was in New York when I got a call from Malcolm.
He had just reached the Los Angeles Airport.
He said, "Can you get out here?"
MALCOLM: The person, whom you have come
to know as Ronald Stokes, we know him as brother Ronald.
And an innocent man when he was murdered.
PARKS: That's when Ronald Stokes was shot.
Police had gone to the mosque,
and there'd been some confrontation
with the young Muslims out in front of the mosque.
MALCOLM: These are the victims of police bullets.
And it is the police who should be on trial here in Los Angeles.
PARKS: Malcolm wanted to show the rest of the world
that these guys were using brutality,
especially against Muslims.
MALCOLM: They can go in and murder unarmed,
innocent Negroes,
and the White public is gullible enough to back them up.
PARKS: Malcolm was terribly angry,
as were a lot of Black people who were not Muslims.
I was angry myself, terribly angry.
It was very tense out there.
Cops were patrolling the streets.
I knew if something happened, I would be in the firing line.
I never separated myself from them
in terms of being a reporter.
I felt, frankly, like a Muslim.
Malcolm and I really felt like brothers.
(CHUCKLES) He was not the fiery monster
that he was on the street corner.
He was a gentle, sweet guy.
Coming between Los Angeles and New York,
we took a night plane.
And he leaned over on my shoulder and said to me,
"Brother, you know I have a lot of respect for you."
Things of that sort.
And I said, "Well, I have a lot of respect for you."
He dropped his head on my shoulder and went to sleep.
When we reached New York, I said, "You called me 'brother'
for the first time." He said,
"Well, for the first time, you deserved it."
(LAUGHS)
♪ (EMOTIONAL MUSIC PLAYS) ♪
When the story came out in LIFE,
the headline and the disposition of the text to photographs
turned it into something very inflammatory.
The text is quite critical.
It presents this, you know, what was the popular view
of the Nation of Islam at the time.
As an outsider group, as a somewhat violent group.
What's fascinating is that Gordon Parks
actually contributes his own separate text
saying, "These are systemic problems
across the United States.
These are problems that are relevant to everyone's life.
These are problems that you should see from this point of view."
And that's where he becomes an activist.
-ASSISTANT CAMERAMAN: B-mark. -Backward action!
LAURA HARRIER: Are you down for the liberation of Black people?
JOHN DAVID WASHINGTON: Do we always have to talk politics?
What's more important?
LEE: Cut! Check the gate.
I love Gordon.
We just have great respect for each other.
Action!
He's one of the guys, without them,
I would not be the filmmaker I am.
OSSIE DAVIS: Harlem has come to bid farewell
to one of its brightest hopes.
LEE: At the end of Malcolm X, we had my brother, Ossie Davis,
re-record the eulogy
which he gave at Malcolm's Muslim funeral.
And there's a montage.
Many of the pictures were taken by my brother, Gordon Parks.
We were very happy that
Gordon gave us the permission to use those
historic photographs of Malcolm X.
That camera in his hands was a weapon.
That was a motherfuckin' bazooka!
(LAUGHS)
That wasn't no six shooter or rifle.
When Mr. Gordon Parks had that camera in his hand,
that was a bazooka.
But you're not gonna get the great photographs
if you don't establish trust.
Gordon come in, light up a room,
gave everybody respect. No matter if you were
Gloria Vanderbilt or some bum on the street.
It's only when people feel safe that they open themselves up.
And then, the camera will capture the essence.
At least with the films I'm doing,
especially more for documentaries I think,
you gotta ask people personal questions
about very painful moments in their life.
For example, 4 Little Girls was about the bombing
of the 16th Street Birmingham Baptist Church.
And when you're talking to someone
whose kid was--
dynamite blew their body apart.
That's not easy.
When did you find out that Carole had been in the blast?
When- when my husband and my mother-in-law came back-
came in to tell me.
Oh, boy.
It was just-- It was awful.
It's the job of the artist
to have your subject comfortable.
And Gordon had that gift.
Freedom, freedom.
KAREEM ABDUL-JABBAR: Gordon's photography forms a foundation
for a visual narrative of Black Americans
seen through Black eyes.
If you look at it and date it,
you see the evolution of the Civil Rights Movement.
ANNOUNCER: I have the pleasure to present to you
-Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. -(CROWD CHEERS)
ABDUL-JABBAR: If you look at his photographs, it's a great chronological record
of what the 20th century was about for Black Americans.
Gordon made us visible to people in a way that
no other photographer could have done it.
He came from the community, and that was always obvious.
WALKER: The hold of White supremacy
on the Black psyche was profound.
And it was when we started
to see the images that lifted us up,
that made us feel that we were worthy,
that we began to really demand justice.
And so Gordon Parks was a warrior for justice.
♪ (TRIUMPHANT MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
Cassius Clay is your name no more, is that right?
Yes, sir, it's Muhammad Ali.
Muhammad means worthy of all praises,
and Ali means most high in the Asian-African language.
How long have you had the name?
Well, for about um- two weeks now.
Is there anybody special who gave you the name?
Yes, sir, my leader and teacher, the most honorable Elijah Muhammad.
BERGER: Muhammad Ali began as a reluctant assignment.
I mean, Parks wasn't quite sure who Muhammad Ali was,
his conversion to Islam.
The fact that he sort of transformed from
Cassius Clay into a much more radical political figure.
I just don't understand yet how I can be reclassified as 1-A
without testing me in no way,
just calling me like this, and I just don't understand it.
In other words, you think they called you
only because you're the heavyweight champion of--
And a Muslim too!
Ever since I've joined the Muslim religion,
I've been catching hell from here,
they've been trying to ail me, and trick me into this...
At the time that Muhammad Ali was opposing the Vietnamese War,
he was very controversial.
He really surprised people when he said that
he was taking a stand for himself and for all Americans
who did not support the war,
and that blew a lot of people's minds.
"Ain't no Vietcong ever called me nigger."
Wow.
That crystalized it for all Black Americans.
REPORTER 1: Are you gonna resume your boxing career?
REPORTER 2: Are you talking to us, champ?
No, I will not say nothing. It is all in here.
PARKS: When I met Muhammad Ali,
he was getting in trouble a lot with the press.
I then took it upon myself
to say, "Hey don't let the reporters rile you,
you know, be cooler about it."
(INDISTINCT CLAMOR)
When Parks began to speak with Ali
and follow him around,
the two of them realized they had a tremendous amount in common.
MUHAMMAD: In Gordon Parks's understanding
of Muhammad Ali, was the continuation
of being in the presence of a genius
whose art was just his hands and his attitude,
as compared to Langston Hughes,
or Richard Wright,
or Ralph Ellison.
That was the Malcolm X story too.
Parks could see, in these people,
a version of himself.
And was also trying to say, "If you can see me,
then you should also be able to see them as well."
I wish I was there to see, like, how he really shot.
Even the action moments,
you could tell he slowed the shutter down a little bit
to get that blur.
You could tell his hands were so steady,
where he could just focus on Ali's face, and you can see that emotion,
but you can see the speed of Ali.
Those things that I emulate in my own photography
is about knowing when to speed up that shutter speed
to get that locked-in focus.
When I was starting, I just was always worrying about,
is the image clear? Is the ISO perfect?
Is everything just perfect?
But sometimes, some of the most imperfect pictures
is how you relay that emotion,
and that's what I think he was so good at too.
This image is just, like, one of my favorite pictures of Ali.
The look in his eyes, you see, like that glare.
He's not even looking at Gordon. He's, like, gazing off.
And it's just, like, a beautiful portrait.
He really captured Ali at every moment.
You saw the goofiness of him.
You saw the seriousness.
Many of us know Muhammad Ali as this loudmouthed boxer,
but Gordon brought out the humanitarian side of him.
ABDUL-JABBAR: This to me talks about the peace and serenity
that you get from your spiritual discipline.
Muhammad Ali got a lot from that.
Even though an image is quick, it's quick,
but the time you put in with that person,
you can tell in the image.
You can tell if a person just came in and just snapped and then kept moving.
But you-- if you can see it in their eyes,
it was a real human connection right there.
Muhammad Ali and Gordon,
that relationship that was able to build,
you can tell that it was genuine,
and it was real, and it was authentic.
COACH CALVIN: Switch!
There you go.
You working all that. Give it the same.
ALLEN: Right now, I've been focusing on sports a lot.
With everything that's going on in my city,
a lot of kids are dying because they're in the streets.
CALVIN: Switch.
ALLEN: So what I want to do is to change that narrative
around the youth and give them something to inspire them.
CALVIN: Change up. Where's Rico at?
All y'all still gotta train.
ALLEN: We have this amazing boxing coach
by the name of Calvin.
CALVIN: See how fast that was? (GIGGLES)
ALLEN: I wanted to use my photography to highlight him.
CALVIN: Box!
Good, no backing up.
Side to side. Good.
If Kenny tell him to work the jab, you work your jab.
There you go!
Whoever says work the jab, you beat him to the punch.
ALLEN: Capturing someone getting punched in the face is pretty easy...
(CHUCKLES) ...but it's those
intimate moments, those down moments,
that I really, I love, like, just seeing people be human.
When a coach is giving a pep talk or he hugs a kid.
I like seeing people be vulnerable.
I've been documenting Coach Calvin for a while now.
He's saving lives in West Baltimore.
So what I've been doing is like,
taking a page out of Gordon Parks's book.
I've been embedding myself at the gym with these kids,
and kids love images of themselves.
And that's when I really started realizing how important
my imagery was to my city.
CALVIN: When your hands up, the hands up, go to the body!
He ain't listening. Oh, he listening. Okay!
Oh, good right hand!
Stop wrestling. Punch. Box!
"Gordon Parks's personal history includes
a Kansas Farm, a Minneapolis brothel,
a flophouse in Chicago, a St. Paul jail.
The story of one American who overcame loneliness,
the Depression, poverty,
and his color to find security
and the beginnings of a success."
His book is titled A Choice of Weapons.
Here is Gordon Parks.
(AUDIENCE APPLAUDS)
RAZ-RUSSO: By this point, he's a larger-than-life figure.
You know, he's an incredibly well known,
well respected, powerful figure.
Your pictures of the story of the little boy...
-Flavio? -Flavio.
Flavio, they pronounce it.
...in Rio de Janeiro will long be remembered.
PAUL ROTH: Gordon was asked to make an effective photo essay
that would help Americans understand
the scale of the problem of poverty in Latin America.
MERV GRIFFIN: And here's Flavio?
Yes, that's Flav.
GRIFFIN: Oh, you got so, you called him "Flav."
PARKS: Yes, I called him Flav. He called me Gordo.
ANDERSON COOPER: I remember as a kid looking at pictures of Flavio in Brazil,
and it absolutely sparked an interest in going places
and telling stories, and seeing things with your own eye
and through your own lens.
I wouldn't be a reporter today if it wasn't for Gordon Parks.
BERGER: Those photographs would not just
inspire a response,
they saved Flavio's life.
ROTH: Gordon actually took Flavio
to a doctor for the first time, and that doctor said
that he had very little time left to live,
no more than two years and probably much less than that.
GRIFFIN: Have you heard from him since?
Well, yes, I brought him to America, uh.
People, many of you possibly out there,
sent in money, over 100,000 dollars,
and demanded that I go back and get Flavio
and bring him to the United States to be cured, which I did.
I brought him to the Denver Clinic.
LESLIE PARKS-BAILEY: All of these donations started coming in,
and he took it upon himself to get this child help
for his asthma.
They built a new house for them, and, you know, it's just...
Who does that?
♪ (UPLIFTING MUSIC FADES) ♪
Will you welcome please, Mr. Gordon Parks.
COBB: I think there's an interesting trade off
that Gordon makes as he becomes more prominent.
What, looking back, was the very first
photographic story you ever covered?
Well, the very first photographic story I covered for LIFE
was, I think the 1948, was the Harlem gang story.
COBB: He had previously been able to observe uninterrupted,
you know, with his camera
and, you know, capture the unguarded moment.
To be this Negro man with a camera,
you know, who's going around taking images.
You can't quite do that, you know, when everyone knows you,
where you're showing up on television.
We're talking to Gordon Parks about The Learning Tree,
his brilliant new novel. Poetic.
He has a song about it.
Gordon, I couldn't put it down from the very first page,
and of course, the obvious question comes first,
is it autobiographical?
Well, that's often asked, uh,
I have a-- I must say that it's fictional.
LIFE magazine calls it "Fictional Autobiographical."
(CHUCKLES) It's a tricky one. But I will admit
that I know most of the characters in it.
COBB: At this point, Gordon's personal bearing
begins to become much more distinct and distinguished.
If celebrity was a language, Gordon spoke it fluently.
Have you got anything else in preparation?
Yes, I have an autobiographical book
coming up for Harper's, and a novel,
and there's great talk now
of a movie for The Learning Tree,
and I will be asked to direct that. (CHUCKLES)
I hope certainly, because you know it so much better,
and I hope also that they're going to let you shoot it
just about in the same location.
We hope to go right back to Kansas and shoot this there.
BERGER: I think he gravitated to film
because he understood the immense audience.
Gordon was so interested
in reaching as many people as possible.
The Learning Tree was the first major studio film
directed by an African American director.
So he broke tremendous ground with the film.
All of these things are clues.
Each one should know exactly what they're coming to do,
and what they're gonna do.
DUVERNAY: He demanded that Black crew members
be around him.
He really lifted as he climbed.
With The Learning Tree, they took
a thoroughly integrated crew and cast.
They could work together. They could live together.
They created a feeling of goodwill, you might say.
PARKS: All right, let's shoot it now.
Action!
DUVERNAY: He was not only able to direct the film,
but to, you know, play direct parts in a lot of
the other art practice and disciplines
that went into making the film.
PARKS: I wrote the screenplay, I directed it,
I wrote the music,
and I produced it for Warner Brothers.
COBB: Parks is kind of like the guy in the band
who's gonna play all the instruments.
That would still be a pretty uncommon thing
to see one person do all those things.
But I also think it falls into the same sort of paradox
of his career,
which is that in order to be the first Black person to do something,
you have to be this exceptional talent.
NARRATOR: The 15th and youngest child of a Kansas farmer,
he told of how it was growing up
in his bestselling novel, The Learning Tree.
And now Gordon Parks has returned to the town
where he lived it. And there, made that story
into a motion picture.
(GUNSHOT)
♪ My baby's gone ♪
DUVERNAY: It is an essential film,
certainly in understanding the Black cinematic canon,
but it should be a part of the conversation
as we talk about the American cinematic canon.
And to make something as lyrical and intimate
as The Learning Tree,
and then create a cultural phenomenon
like Shaft is remarkable!
-PARKS: Now the sequence we saw this morning... -Right.
Times Square, panned on off the skyscrapers
along 42nd Street where the marquis is,
and when Shaft pops up out of that subway,
-that's when it should really come on. -Right.
And there should be a driving savage beat,
you know, so that we'll be right with him all the time.
-Mm-hmm. -What I heard you working on earlier
seems great for that Shaft walk.
-Can we hear it now? -HAYES: Yeah, okay.
Now watch the rhythm, man. Just let it flow, you know?
One, two, three, four.
♪ ("THEME FROM SHAFT" BY ISAAC HAYES PLAYING) ♪
COBB: How many detectives have we seen?
From The Maltese Falcon, you know, all the way up.
We have never seen it like this.
-Up yours! -CAB DRIVER: Get out of the way.
COBB: Richard Roundtree was like this swaggering figure.
As they called him back then, the "Black James Bond."
I thought we were gonna get to.
We did, but you wanted me to fidget.
I just said, "Up yours, baby."
The whole point of Shaft is he wasn't part of the system,
that he had agency outside of that.
Don't get wise with me, Shaft. I'll put your goddamn ass in.
I'll sue your goddamn ass for false arrest.
When Shaft interacts with the police, he talks to them
the way that all Black people wanted to talk to the police.
-Cool it, man. -You cool it, boy.
GEORGE: He talked the way he wanted to talk to whoever he wanted to,
and that included the Black radicals,
that included the Harlem gangsters.
And the idea of Black power
became very, very popular with younger people.
You were seeing that in the streets.
You were seeing that in the pop culture.
And it comes through his work as a photographer.
DUVERNAY: When you think about what was going on in the country at that time,
you know, really the country was at war in many ways with itself.
GEORGE: Shaft was the movie that kind of mainstreamed
a lot of that rebellion
through this sort of detective character.
Listen, Snow White,
me and you gonna tangle sooner or later.
We ain't gonna do shit.
LEE: John Shaft represented Black manhood.
We're kicking ass, and we got the ladies too.
(LAUGHS)
We got it covered on all sides!
(LAUGHING)
I didn't see Shaft until much later.
My mother didn't want me watching that.
She thought it was a little too risqué for her baby.
GEORGE: He had White and Black women.
Shaft is in a shower having sex with a White chick
he met at a bar.
That was, whoa.
LEE: I saw it on 42nd Street.
SHAFT: (WHISPERING) No noise.
That motherfuckin' theater was jam packed.
And Black folks were going berserk.
It's like, we ain't never seen no shit like this before.
Open it!
-(DOOR OPENS) -(WOMAN GASPS)
We loved it! Because on the screen
we're looking at a Black superhero.
-(GUN FIRING) -(SCREAMS)
(GUNFIRE)
Shaft is a guy, he has an office in Times Square.
He has a place in the Village,
but he's able to move in Harlem and other spaces as well.
Hey, man. What's goin' on?
GEORGE: He has a relationship with the police and the authorities,
but he also has a relationship with the radical element.
That's Gordon!
And be sure, after you hit him over the head with the bottle,
and you see the blood gush out of his face,
that you maintain the cool that Shaft should maintain.
Gordon introduced me to Morty Sills, his tailor.
He says, um, "He will put it all together for you."
He never told me this, and it was only years after
that I looked back on it in retrospect,
it was Gordon Parks.
PARKS: Gentlemen, do your scene as you did it in the master.
No mistakes, because this is the type
we don't like to retake.
GENEVIEVE YOUNG: The swaggering guy
with that black leather jacket, which became an icon.
This was Gordon's other personality.
That was beautiful, sweetheart.
BERGER: The movie was a critical success
and a box office success.
It won an Oscar for Isaac Hayes's
extraordinary song for the opening credits.
It literally set into motion the idea that
if you make Black films, people will come and see them.
NARRATOR: Shaft is back!
Drop the guns and freeze!
NARRATOR: He's super hood, super high, super dude,
super fly.
COBB: The arrival of Blaxploitation
really shored up Hollywood's fortunes.
Those films were inexpensive to make
and guaranteed really significant box offices.
-Don't crowd me, boy. -You better put that down before I make you eat it.
COBB: But after being kind of a source
of a great deal of revenue, there wasn't anything beyond that.
Very few times would the story deviate
from the same old, same old thing.
And eventually, the Black audience got tired
and the genre died out because
they went to the well way too often.
(EXPLOSIONS)
That whole wave of Black film, that Gordon helped create,
crested, and Hollywood moved on.
♪ (SOMBER MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
COBB: When Blaxploitation began to fade out,
there was no avenue to say, "Okay, we want Gordon Parks
to direct this World War II epic."
Or like any of the kind of natural progressions
that you would've seen, especially kind of the heyday
of the 1970s American director.
You don't see him get entrée into that.
PARKS: I've never been offered some of the films
that would have been offered to me had I been White.
Let's put it very simply like that.
YOUNG: He really wanted to keep on being a director,
but nobody asked him anymore. That grieved him a lot.
He had not achieved what he wanted to in the movie world.
LEE: No matter who you are, as an artist,
and you're not able to expand and grow,
it's gonna hurt your soul.
Because your soul is what...
is what your art is.
ROTH: He was not a comfortable fit.
While he had been able to walk a tightrope
at LIFE magazine,
he couldn't quite walk the tightrope in Hollywood.
So it was a brief meteoric career,
and then it was all over.
DUVERNAY: Of course, Hollywood has changed from the late '60s,
when he started making films,
but it's changed because he changed it, you know.
It's changed because, you know, he opened the door.
♪ (MUSIC CONCLUDES) ♪
All the years that I knew Gordon,
over 20 years that I worked with him...
the next project is what was important.
How was this going to affect the future?
And that's where he wanted to go.
He was always moving forward.
PARKS: I want to compose more. I want to compose differently.
I want to write more. I want to write differently.
This all takes time, and I know I don't have
that much time.
LESLIE: He would stay up until, you know,
six o'clock in the morning, typing.
I remember when I would stay with him,
just hearing the typewriter going,
like, he just never stopped working.
Being creative was just something
he couldn't help doing.
YOUNG: He just had this drive to work all the time.
Expression of his talent was his religion.
PARKS: At 85, I really feel that I'm just ready to start.
SHABAZZ: I met him at the Leica Gallery in the '90s.
I had just had a really difficult day at jail
where a young man tried to kill himself.
You know, like maybe two hours earlier,
and now I'm at an opening.
I was downstairs about to leave, and Gordon had come down.
And I asked him, you know, with all due respect, sir,
may I take a photograph of you?
And he had a really bad toothache, and he couldn't speak.
He looked me in my eyes, and he raised his right hand,
and he shook his fist about three times as he looked at me.
He must have saw the pain inside me at that point.
Through his body language, he let me know that
you are in a sense,
carry on that torch, like, hang in there.
GEORGE: I had friends who knew him, so I was able to be around him.
He wasn't just a guy who photojournalists knew
or other people in the photo art world knew.
Gordon was able to leap out of the world of photography
into the world of popular culture.
In the summer of 1998,
XXL magazine, which was then a fledgling hip-hop magazine,
decided to do a photograph reenacting
the Great Day in Harlem photo that he had taken in '58.
♪ (UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
GEORGE: But the big deal was, who was going to shoot it?
And they were desperately trying to get Gordon,
and he finally agreed to do it.
And him doing that photo made the photo really important.
Legendary, legendary.
GEORGE: Connecting the generations
between the hip-hop world and the jazz world.
RAKIM: I watched footage on the Great Day in Harlem
and what that meant to them, man.
And how Thelonious Monk came down.
And then, I mean, yo, it means something to me.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
I came out to do my part,
to represent my culture, you know what I mean.
GEORGE: A wide range of artists all say part of the reason
for being there was Gordon Parks.
When they called, I said, "Yo, who's doing it man?" I had to be here man.
GEORGE: Hip-hop was not the number one pop culture in '98.
So for Gordon to be there, for them was a validation.
-There's times when he walks up... -(APPLAUSE)
...to try and move people around during the photoshoot,
and people are applauding because he's there.
ADGER COWANS: I think he was really touched by that.
And when he got ready to get in the car,
he was like... (GASPS)
I mean, I was right behind him and I'm,
"Get in the car, man. Quit fuckin' around."
♪ (UPBEAT JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
FRAZIER: Zion, go to your papa's shoulder.
Stand by him.
-Me? -FRAZIER: You're taking a portrait with me.
ZION: Lights, camera, action!
FRAZIER: So, here, let me show you.
So wrap your arm around, and don't be stiff.
Come on. This is the shot. This is an important shot.
-Yeah. -FRAZIER: Because I don't have this one, okay?
FRAZIER: What Gordon Parks's legacy in life has showed me
is that I am visually representing people
like how a lawyer represents the plaintiff
and their client, right. And that is a real fight.
Do you always wear your glasses?
MR. SMILEY: I see better without them.
FRAZIER: Oh, yeah. Look at those eyes. All right, Mr. Smiley.
These aren't projects.
There is real blood depending on that work circulating,
and being out in the world.
I get to tell this narrative nobody wanted to tell.
FRAZIER: So Zion, you're going to be focused and concentrating
on me and the lens.
And I want you to be like, you know, proud.
Bring your chin down just a little bit.
(CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS)
FRAZIER: I think it's important to create this visual narrative
that pays homage to Gordon's legacy
of understanding how to take
the trauma behind institutional racism,
or constantly being under siege in America
because you're Black,
and convey that to a viewer with an evocative feeling.
♪ (DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
RAZ-RUSSO: Looking at Gordon Parks's photographs today,
what's incredible about them is that they're timeless.
They're as relevant today as they were, you know,
thirty, 40, 50 years ago.
STEVENSON: He's created this catalogue of images
that today now tell an important story
that we're still trying to understand,
and if we're willing to look at that story, we'll gain an appreciation
of some truths that we've been slow to recognize.
COBB: Gordon resonates because life
has continually reminded us of things that he tried to tell us.
We have seen in Minneapolis,
you know, a city that Gordon had personal connection to,
there's a high school named for him there,
the most brutal depictions of racism.
And you know, we've seen
just how crucial images are to us
understanding our own humanity.
I don't think that we really get to understand
the world that we operate in
in the same way that we understand it now without Gordon.
BERGER: His influence is now legendary.
And I think it's because he represented something
that was both dynamic in its own time
and years ahead of its time.
DUVERNAY: When you look at him
and the many disciplines and tools he was using.
Photography, he was writing books,
he was making movies. I mean, he was doing it all.
That kind of gave me permission to think,
you can do more.
SHABAZZ: As a photographer and as photographers,
I think that we have a responsibility
to kind of, like, lend our voice
and use our cameras as weapons
to counterbalance a lot that's going on out there.
You know, so like Gordon,
what I'm just trying to do now is offer a counter narrative
to a lot of the negative images
that we are so accustomed to seeing.
Of course, the photographs can make a difference.
BUNCH: What Parks reminds us is
that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
That vigilance only comes from a visual way
of understanding what we're experiencing
and what needs to be confronted.
And I think contemporary photographers
are really standing on his shoulders when they do that.
ALLEN: When you think about Gordon Parks and his legacy,
yes, we love the work, this is our passion,
but it's also about the people you touch
and how we change their lives using this art form
to bring people together.
FRAZIER: When I'm shooting images of people,
I will see a Gordon Parks image, and I'll know
that I'm making that portrait
that's in conversation with all of that legacy.
♪ (ORCHESTRAL MUSIC INTENSIFIES) ♪
♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪
FRAZIER: Whenever I get lost, or stumble, or trip,
I'll never tire of always looking to Gordon.
♪ (INTENSE MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
♪ (MELANCHOLIC MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
♪ (MUSIC FADES) ♪