An Awakening to Power of Photographs

Gordon Parks spent the 1930s working a variety of odd jobs that included playing piano in a brothel and cleaning up after alcoholics in a Chicago flophouse. In the mid-1930s, Parks married a St. Paul woman and took a railroad job where he discovered the power of the camera. Here is Part III of a five-part excerpt from “Voices in the Mirror,” the autobiography of the renowned photographer.

I applied for a job as a waiter on the North Coast Limited and got it. It was a fine transcontinental train that ran between St. Paul, Chicago and Seattle, Wash., which took about four days.

On quieter runs, in between meals, when the wealthy passengers were either sleeping or consuming alcohol in the lounge cars, I read every magazine I could get my hands on.

In one that had been left behind by a passenger, I found a portfolio of photographs that I would never forget. They were migrant workers. Dispossessed, beaten by storms, dust and floods, they roamed the highways in caravans of battered jalopies and wagons between Oklahoma and California, scrounging for work.

The names of the photographers stuck in my mind--Arthur Rothstein, Russell Lee, Carl Mydans, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, John Vachon, Jack Delano and Dorothea Lange. They all worked for the Farm Security Administration, a government agency set up by President Roosevelt to aid submarginal farmers.

These stark, tragic images of human beings caught up in the confusion of poverty saddened me. I took the magazine home and studied it for weeks. Meanwhile, I read John Steinbeck’s “In Dubious Battle” and Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White’s “You Have Seen Their Faces.” These books stayed in my mind.

During layovers in Chicago, I began visiting the Art Institute on Michigan Avenue, spending hours in this large, voiceless place, studying paintings of Monet, Renoir and Manet. At a Chicago movie house, I watched a newsreel of the bombing of the United States gunboat Panay by Japanese fighter planes. Courageously the cameraman had stayed at his post, shooting the final belch of steam and smoke that rose when the boat sank in the Yangtze River.

When the newsreel ended, a voice boomed over the intercom. “And here he is--the photographer who shot this remarkable footage!” Norman Alley, the cameraman, had leaped on the stage to rousing cheers. And I was carried away by his bravery and dedication to his job. From that moment I was determined to become a photographer.

Three days later, I bought my first camera at a pawnshop for $7.50. It was a Voightlander Brilliant. Not much of a camera, but a great name to toss around. I had bought what was to become my weapon against poverty and racism.

I got a porter’s job on the 400, a fast train that ran between Minneapolis and Chicago.

The 400 allowed me layovers in Chicago. There, visual imagery multiplied tenfold, with skyscrapers, boats plying Lake Michigan, bridges and the inner-city canals. But before long I realized that such imagery, although it was fine for the family album, was hardly the kind to put steak and potatoes on my family’s table. A beautiful sunset over the lake was just a beautiful sunset--no more.

Natural instinct had served to aim my sights much higher, and those Farm Security photographs with all their power were still pushing my thoughts around. Before long I had deserted the waterfronts, skyscrapers and canals for Chicago’s south side--the city’s sprawling impoverished black belt. And there among the squalid, rickety tenements that housed the poor, a new way of seeing and feeling opened up to me.

A photograph I made of an ill-dressed black child wandering in a trash-littered alley and another of two aged men warming themselves at a bonfire during a heavy snowfall pleased me more than any I had made. They convinced me that even the cheap camera I had bought was capable of making a serious comment on the human condition.

Subconsciously, I was moving toward the documentary field, and Chicago’s south side was a remarkably pitiful place to start. The worst of it was like bruises on the face of humanity.

A collection of photographs I had taken in the impoverished area of the black belt came to the attention of the Julius Rosenwald Fund, a cultural foundation established by its namesake to aid promising blacks and Southern whites. Writers, painters, sculptors and scholars had been recipients of fellowships--but never a photographer. I was considered to be promising, so my work was sent to be judged by a jury of Chicago’s most esteemed white photographers and, to a man, they turned thumbs down.

To allow my application yet another chance, my work was then sent to a jury composed of painters and sculptors. While I awaited their decision, time crawled ever so slowly. Worry set in. The postman arrived with nothing but bills. After three weeks the jury was still out, still feeding my anxiety and sleepless nights. The fourth week an envelope, with the fund’s masthead, appeared in the small pack of mail. I was fearful of opening it; it seemed to be shaped with rejection. I handed it to Sally, my wife, so that she might read the bad news. She tore the envelope open, read its contents and smiled weakly. “You are a Julius Rosenwald Fellow.” The news was astonishing.

Through the prodding of the fund, I was to serve out my fellowship with the Farm Security Administration, with these same photographers whose work had beckoned to me when I was a waiter on the North Coast Limited. It was an extravagant moment as we began packing, and for the next two years Washington, D.C., would be our home.

I arrived there in January of 1942 with scant knowledge of the place, knowing only that beneath the gleaming monuments and gravestones lay men who had distinguished themselves. What I had learned along the way had little to do with this sprawling city where Washington and Lincoln had been empowered.

Sensing this, Roy Stryker, the photographic mentor at FSA, sent me out to get acquainted with the rituals of the nation’s capital. I went in a hurry and with enthusiasm. The big blue sky was without clouds and everything seemed so pure, clean and unruffled. It appeared that the entire universe was pleasured in peace.

My contentment was short-lived. Within the hour the day began opening up like a bad dream; even here in this radiant, high-hearted place, racism was busy with its dirty work. Eating houses shooed me to the back door; theaters refused me a seat, and the scissoring voices of white clerks at Julius Garfinckel’s prestigious department store riled me with curtness. Some clothing I hoped to buy there went unbought. They just didn’t have my size--no matter what I wanted.

In a very short time, Washington was showing me its real character. It was a hate-drenched city, honoring my ignorance and smugly creating bad memories for me. During the afternoon my entire childhood rushed back to greet me, to remind me that the racism it poured on me had not called it quits.

I had gone to a restaurant to eat, to a store to buy clothing and to a movie theater for enjoyment. And Washington was telling me, in no uncertain terms, that I shouldn’t have done it. Now I was hurrying back to Roy Stryker’s office like an angry wind.

When I reached there, he looked at me for a few moments without speaking. He didn’t have to. The gloom shadowing my face told him everything. “Well,” he finally asked, “tell me--how did it go?”

I answered him with a question. “What’s to be done about this horrible place? I’ve never been so humiliated in my life. Mississippi couldn’t be much worse.”

He rubbed his chin, thinking. “As for that city out there, well--it’s been here for a long time, full of bigotry and hatred for black people. You brought a camera to town with you. If you use it intelligently, you might help turn things around. It’s a powerful instrument in the right hands.”

He paused, thinking things through for me. “Obviously, you ran into some bigots out there this afternoon. Well, it’s not enough to photograph one of them and label his photograph bigot. Bigots have a way of looking like everyone else. You have to get at the source of their bigotry. And that’s not easy. That’s what you’ll have to work at, and that’s why I took you on.

“Read. Read a lot. Talk to the black people who have spent their lives here. They might help to give you some direction. Go through these picture files. They have a lot to say about what’s happening here and other places throughout this country. They are an education in themselves. The photographers who produced those files learned through understanding what our country’s problems are. Now they are out there trying to do something about those problems. That’s what you must do eventually.”

Eventually. All well and good--but I was still burning with a need to hit back at the agony of the afternoon. I sat for an hour mulling over his advice and the humiliation I had suffered.

It had grown late; the office had emptied and Stryker had left for the day. Only a black charwoman remained, but she was mopping the floor in an adjoining office. “Talk to other black people who have spent their lives here,” he had said.

She was black, and I eased into conversation with her. Hardly an hour had gone by when we finished, but she had taken me through a lifetime of drudgery and despair in that hour. She was turning back to her mopping when I asked, “Would you allow me to photograph you?”

“I don’t mind.”

There was a huge American flag hanging from a standard near the wall. I asked her to stand before it, then placed the mop in one hand and the broom in the other. “Now think of what you just told me and look straight into this camera.” Eagerly I began clicking the shutter. It was done and I went home to supper. Washington could now have a conversation with her portrait.

Stryker appeared astonished when I laid the enlarged photograph on his desk the following afternoon. “My God,” he said. “You’re going to get us all fired.” I smiled, but to myself, knowing I had found a little justice in that sea of bigotry.

Stryker’s advice was sound but not easy to follow. While some black people talked freely about racial problems in Washington, some, especially older ones, viewed my curiosity with suspicion. Feeling hopelessly ensnared in the city’s bigoted ways, they looked upon change as an impossibility. Yielding to racism, they had given up.

Photographing bigotry was, as Stryker had warned, very difficult. It didn’t have a repulsive body with a head of horns. Yet it was there like a stone wall, revealing itself in a voice, a mannerism or some empirical way.

The evil of its effect, however, was discernible in the black faces of the oppressed and their blighted neighborhood lying within the shadows of the Capitol. It was in those shadows that the charwoman lived, and I followed her through them--to her dark house, her storefront church; to her small happinesses and daily frustrations.