Photographers of Influence
Gordon Parks was a photographer who used his pictures as a means of photojournalism and activism. He documented African-Americans and injustice as pertaining to the civil rights movement and poverty. Parks worked at the Farm Security Administration (FSA) through a photography fellowship, and used his time there to document a woman named Ella Watson, the subject of his “American Gothic”. His photographic essay on a Harlem gang leader in 1948 led to a job as a photographer and writer for Life Magazine. While at Life, (he worked there for over twenty years), Parks documented poverty and racial segregation, and took portraits of some notable figures, including Malcolm X, Kwame Ture, Muhammad Ali, and Barbara Streisand. In 1960, Parks was named photographer of the year by the American Society of Magazine Photographers. In addition to photography, Parks directed films, composed music, wrote books, and even made some paintings. Some of the films he directed included, “Shaft”(
