I first started appreciating Gordon Parks's work when looking for images to include in the book Writing About Literature in the Media Age. Not every image should make it into a book about literature. Not every image is rich enough to express ideas related to culture, reflect human identity, or deliver a meaningful message, in fact few images are that rich. In reading this obituary for Gordon Parks from the Washington Post, I was also struck by another dimension of his work: the way his images trace a lineage of photographic art that runs from social documentary and change-agent to contemporary commentary on celebrity and culture. I've always associated Parks's early work with Life Magazine, so seeing the connection with FSA photographers helped cement the documentary foundation. The Post piece explains,

While working on the Northern Pacific Railroad in the late 1930s, Parks picked up a magazine that had been left by a passenger and leafed through it. A photo spread of migrant workers and their living conditions taken by Carl Mydans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn and others working for the Farm Security Administration captivated him.

One afternoon in the winter of 1937, during a stopover in Chicago, he saw newsreel footage taken by Norman Alley of the sinking of the USS Panay by Japanese forces. Parks compared Alley's documentary approach with the works of Farm Security Administration photographers and had an epiphany.

"Suddenly I became aware of all the things I could say through this medium," he once said. "I sat through another show, and even before I left the theater, I had made up my mind to become a professional photographer."

When I look at images like Migrant Mother and American Gothic, Washington DC, I see more clearly this documentary dimension of Parks's images and recognize the talent for capturing iconic images that speak to social concerns.

But Parks also stands out for the way he allows us to see the pivot from documentation to participation in the social world enabled by photography. Though they resonate visually with the documentary style, celebrity photographs like Muhammad Ali in Training make larger statements about the status of personal identity in a culture that is growing increasingly public and visual. His movement into filmmaking and his celebrity images reveal an ability to picture and push for awareness and change, even as the media and surrounding culture shifted toward moving, fractured, public, and commodified representation through images.

My favorite Parks image, I think, captures this sense of the man as a figure who bridged documentation with more contemporary commentary. Ingrid Bergmann at Stromboli says everything about the double-edged nature of celebrity with its shifting contrasts between Ingrid Bergmann with light complexion and white shirt in the foreground shadows and the on-looking (and judging) Sicilian women in the brightly lit background. Rich with insight into perspectives on identity and culture, the image, like the life and work of Parks, deserves our celebration.