Synopses & Reviews
At age eighty-four, Gordon Parks is truly a living legend -- a photographer, filmmaker, novelist, poet, and composer whose life and work present one of the most inspiring success stories of our time. Now, with Half Past Autumn, this brilliant artist gives us the first complete retrospective of his photographic career -- a book that fuses nearly 300 unforgettable images with Parks's own account of his amazing life.
Half Past Autumn chronicles how Parks was able to turn his rage against racism into a creative force -- and transform himself from a homeless teenager into one of the great photojournalists of his era, working first for the Farm Security Administration, then at Vogue, and finally as a staff photographer for Life magazine. The images included here cover a remarkable range of subjects -- youth gangs in New York City, fashion models in Paris, a young boy in the brutally poor slums of Rio de Janeiro, portraits of Ingrid Bergman and Winston Churchill, and civil rights protests, to name a few -- but all are marked by Parks's bold signature style and uncompromising vision. The book also includes a sampling of Parks's recent abstract work in color, which achieves an almost mystical intensity.
Synopsis
Gordon Parks is a living legend. At age eighty-four, he can look back on accomplishments in many fields, including fiction, poetry, film, and music. But first and foremost, Parks is a photographer - a man whose indelible photojournalism, including two decades at Life magazine, has made him one of this century's most esteemed image makers. Accompanied throughout by Parks's recollections and reflections, the nearly 300 images collected in Half Past Autumn give us the full measure of this photographer's achievements for the first time. In the early 1940s, Parks launched his career with a remarkable array of documentary images for the Historical Section of the Farm Security Administration, including his unforgettable American Gothic photograph of Ella Watson, a black charwoman in Washington, D.C. During the same period, Parks landed fashion assignments at Vogue (Harper's Bazaar had rejected him because they wouldn't hire blacks), which paved the way for his later forays into the world of Parisian haute couture.