A Conscience With a Lens

Willis is teaching about Parks this semester at Harvard in a course titled "The Body and the Lens."

"It's about how Gordon used his work in a political way," she says.

Like Baldwin, Hughes and Richard Wright, he stretched boundaries and woke up others.

The government helped when he got work in the historical section of the Farm Security Administration's photography project.

In Washington in 1942 he aimed his camera at a woman no one had heard of by the name of Ella Watson. She was a cleaning lady with a thin, haunted face. She was poor as nickels. Parks once said the photograph said as much as a picture of a cross burning: "I thought then . . . that you could not photograph a person who turns you away from the motion picture ticket window, or someone who refuses to feed you, or someone who refuses to wait on you in a store. You could not photograph him and say, 'This is a bigot,' because bigots have a way of looking like everybody else."

"With that image," says Willis of the Watson photograph, "he was trying to show survival -- and beauty. The beauty in looking at the woman in raising her children and adopted daughter. The broom and mop were iconic images of the American woman. He was constructing a story about women who survived."

There was much work in the '50s photographing actors, fashion shows, beautiful things. He had seen the awful cruelties of life, and then he aimed his camera into the expanse of beauty as well. Broadway intrigued him. There's Tallulah Bankhead onstage in "Dear Charles." There's languidly beautiful Hildegarde Neff onstage in "Silk Stockings." There's Lorraine Hansberry -- a world-beater following her Broadway debut of "A Raisin in the Sun" -- at Sardi's, her hair high on her head. There's a parish priest strolling through a wheat field with a parishioner.

But in the '60s Parks was determined again to put the saga of America and her deep hurts into his lens.

Chicago at that time was as cruel a city as could be when it came to black poverty, its ailments profound and endless. Congress was trying to find ways to address poverty with legislation, but it wasn't enough. In Chicago, there were children eating plaster in their cold apartments because they were hungry.

For its March 8, 1968, issue, Life gave Parks both pen and camera. He went to Chicago and stood on a street corner, checking the light. He held nothing back.

"Look at me and know that to destroy me is to destroy yourself," the photographer wrote in introducing his photo spread. "You are weary of the long hot summers. I am tired of the long hungered winters. We are not so far apart as it might seem. There is something about both of us that goes deeper than blood or black and white. . . . My children's needs are the same as your children's."

Sixteen pages of Parks in words and photos: a child sleeping against a bedroom wall with holes; children studying in darkness; a picture of Jesus; a snaggle-toothed child who had been eating plaster; a man with a wave of tears in his eyes; a child and mother on a bed.