PHOTOGRAPHY : He Just Did It : Gordon Parks didn’t make it through grade school. But he did overcome more than a few other, bigger obstacles to become a legendary photographer, filmmaker, poet and composer.

Gordon Parks is what’s known as a self-made man. He was born in a small Midwestern town in 1912, the youngest of 15 children, never finished high school and was on the road fending for himself by age 15.

With little or no help, he went on to write several books, including five volumes of poetry and a best-selling autobiography, “The Learning Tree.” He also worked as a photographer for Vogue in the ‘40s and for Life magazine from 1949 to 1969, directed several films, including the commercial blockbusters “Shaft” and “Shaft’s Big Score” and composed symphonies and sonatas.

Gloria Vanderbilt wanted to marry him, he says. Eldridge Cleaver wanted him to come to work for the Black Panthers. He’s received 28 honorary doctorates from colleges and universities across the country and has counted among his friends everyone from Vidal Sassoon and Marlon Brando to the late Malcolm X.

All of this is doubly impressive in light of the fact that Parks, who is black, made his way in the world when American racial relations were still in the Stone Age. Now 81, he’s still going strong, and an exhibition of his newest photographs is on view at the G. Ray Hawkins Gallery through Nov. 26.

Showcasing work from “Arias in Silence,” a new book that pairs Parks’ poetry with recently completed lush, computer-generated images inspired by British painter J.M.W. Turner, the exhibition finds Parks a long way from his beginnings as a social documentary photographer in the ‘40s, when he was shooting gritty images of poverty in America for the Farm Security Administration. A lyrical reflection on the ebb and flow of nature, “Arias in Silence” is the work of an artist confident of his own abilities, no longer bent on proving anything. It’s an extremely graceful book.

Parks, visiting Los Angeles from his home in Manhattan, is pretty graceful himself. An impeccably dapper man, Parks is dressed to the nines and speaks in a low, husky whisper worthy of Barry White.

Parks really knows how to work the room, and it quickly becomes apparent that there’s more than a little of him in his cinematic creation, ultra-cool defender of truth and justice John Shaft. A sly fox who learned long ago how to discreetly go about his business, how to get down with the brothers in the street and charm the rich society ladies, Parks pretty much talked his way into every job he’s ever had. He confides this with undisguised pride in a conspiratorial whisper before launching into the story of his life.

“I was born in Ft. Scott, Kansas, and my earliest memories are of being around my blind uncle there,” he begins. “He was a philosopher, and I can remember him saying things like ‘I’m blind, so I don’t know the color of your skin--for all I know, you have purple eyes and green hair,’ ” says Parks, a polished storyteller who has clearly spent a good deal of time rummaging around in his own past.

“My father was a dirt farmer and we ate off the land, but it wasn’t much of a farm,” he continues. “My mother always saw that we had enough to eat, though. Family life was good and my mother was a wonderful woman--I never once saw my parents have a fight--but there were things surrounding my life that weren’t so nice. Kansas was supposedly a free state, but I couldn’t take my girlfriend to the drugstore for a soda and went to a segregated grade school. I can remember the advisers at school telling black kids, ‘Don’t worry about graduating--it doesn’t matter, because you’re gonna be porters and maids.’ There were lynchings in Kansas too.

“At the time I wasn’t aware I was converting those ugly experiences into fuel, but in retrospect I can see that the racism I experienced as a child gave me my drive. My mother always said, ‘Don’t come home complaining about anything because of your blackness--just get out there and do it.’ That was her philosophy, and it served me well.

“My mother was a devoutly religious woman who wouldn’t allow jazz in the house, but even though I’d never heard it, I had a yen toward symphonic music from the time I was a child--I heard the June bugs playing music in the cornfields,” he says with a laugh. “When I was 12 I bought a valve trombone and joined the school orchestra. I had such a good ear I was able to bluff my way through the performances--nobody knew I couldn’t read music.”

Parks’ life changed dramatically in 1927 when his mother died of heart disease and he was sent to live in Minneapolis with his brother-in-law.

“That man didn’t like children and didn’t want to take me on, and I sensed that the minute I walked into his house,” Parks recalls. “He pushed me out the door when it was 5 below zero outside and threw everything I owned out the second-story window. It was frightening being 15 years old and having no place to stay, with $2 in my pocket--I guess it was him that started me on the road early.”

Drifting from Minneapolis to Chicago, Parks lived in a flophouse while working a series of odd jobs--he was a busboy, a waiter, a pianist in a brothel.

“When I was in Chicago I began waking up to art and started hanging out at the Chicago Art Institute,” he says. “I was knocked out by the things I saw there--Manet, Monet, I loved it all.”

In 1933, Parks landed a job with the Civilian Conservation Corps, which stationed him in Ft. Dix, N.J., and he married his first wife, Sally Alvis. The first of their three children, Gordon Jr., was born the next year, and three years later, in 1937, Parks bought his first camera. Parks was working as a waiter for the Northern Pacific Railroad at the time, and his knowledge of photography was pretty much limited to the pictures he saw in magazines left on the train by wealthy passengers.

Entirely self-taught as a photographer, he had managed to secure piecemeal work with his camera when, in 1942, he put in a bid to work for Rod Stryker and the government-sponsored Farm Security Administration, which recruited a prestigious team of photographers to document rural poverty in America. The group included Walker Evans, Marion Post Wolcott and Dorothea Lange.

“Stryker accepted me reluctantly--he’d been criticized for his team of glamour-boy photographers--and now they were gonna have a black glamour boy,” Parks says. “He took me on, though, and I shot all over America for the FSA. It was during those years that I learned the power the camera has.”

Parks, who relocated to Washington to work with the FSA, was also writing during those years and published two books, “Flash Photography” in 1947 and “Camera Portraits: The Techniques and Principles of Documentary Portraiture” in 1948. With three children to support by 1943, he had to moonlight to make ends meet and free-lanced for Glamour and Vogue. “My work became rather chic when I was working for Vogue,” he ruefully acknowledges, “but it was a matter of survival when I worked for them.”

In 1949 Parks joined the staff of Life magazine, and in 1950 he was assigned to its Paris bureau, where he spent two years. Returning to New York in 1952, he went on to cover more than 300 stories for Life on a variety of subjects, including several critically acclaimed photo essays on the Black Power movement of the ‘60s.

“I traveled with the Black Panthers and knew the Black Muslims too--all of them contributed in their way,” Parks says of those controversial organizations. “Whether you like them or not, they presented a unified front, and that was important.

“I covered the Panthers for Life, but Life didn’t trust me for one second. I was the only one who could do it, though, so I got the job. Why should Life trust me to tell the Panthers story like it really was? Why should the Muslims trust me? Everybody was paranoid then, and they had reason to be.

“I was with Marlon Brando the night Martin Luther King was shot,” Parks says, reflecting further on the social upheavals of the ‘60s. “He absolutely flipped--he called Panther headquarters and started ordering guns, saying he was gonna shoot his way to Washington. I said to him, ‘Marlon, look out at those city lights. There are a lot of people out there who feel like you do. You’re a public figure. You can’t just start blasting away.’ ”

Being on the front lines of the Black Power movement put Parks in danger that reached crisis proportion in 1965 when he did a photo essay for Life on Malcolm X.

“At that point I got a serious death threat, so Life sent my family out of the country and put me under 24-hour armed guard at the Plaza Hotel in New York. I lived like that for several months until one day I snuck out, got into my XKE Jaguar, went up to Harlem to talk to the people who were threatening me and sorted things out myself.”

“This country’s made real progress in terms of racism, but the progress that hasn’t been made is still jolting,” he says. “When you see something like the Rodney King thing go down, you realize how much progress there is yet to be made. That episode didn’t surprise me, though, because I’ve had experience with California cops--I could tell you things you wouldn’t believe,” he adds with a laugh. “They’re kind of a high-strung bunch.”

While America was being rocked with change, Parks’ personal life was in turmoil as well. After he and Alvis divorced in 1962, he married his second wife, Liz Campbell. They divorced 11 years later, and he married Genevieve Young, whom he would also later divorce. An unrepentant ladies’ man, Parks maintains friendly relations with all three ex-wives and says that his closest friends are women.

“The New Yorker wants to do a piece on how I get along so well with my wives,” he reports, prompting the question as to why the marriages ended if he got along so well with these women. “The marriages ended because I’m a bad boy,” he says, laughing. “Doing the kind of work I do makes it tremendously difficult to have a stable personal life.”

The year after Parks married his second wife, the first of his four autobiographies, “The Learning Tree,” was published, and in 1969 it was made into a movie. With assistance from filmmaker John Cassavetes, whom he had photographed for Life magazine and who was a fan of the book, Parks was hired to script, direct and score the film. He was to spend the next five years slugging it out in Hollywood and completed several successful films before leaving the industry in disgust in 1975 when “Leadbelly,” his film biography of blues great Huddie Ledbetter, was buried in a studio changing of the guard.

“Frank Yablans hired me to make the film, and he was replaced by Barry Diller right when I finished it,” Parks says. “Diller didn’t want to put money into Yablans’ films, so basically he tried to kill my film--he released it to porno houses! I talked about this openly with the press, and Diller called me up very irate about that, but I called him a bunch of bad names and told him not to call me again. At that point I decided I’d had enough Hollywood crap and stopped making films.”

This is a decision Parks is recon sidering. He recently completed “The Sun Stalker,” a novel on the life of British painter Turner, and he would like to see it made into a film. Toward that end, he met with a Hollywood producer who began the meeting, Parks says, by telling him: “Bill Styron was in here last week with a screenplay, and I told Bill it’s just not time for a picture about slavery.”

“Because I was black he assumed I was there to talk about Nat Turner!” Parks says. “I said, ‘No, this picture is about J. M. W. Turner’--who he’d never heard of, of course.

“The hardest thing I’ve had to learn to accept in life is racism. I grew up alongside a white kid named Waldo--both his parents were drunks, so my mother took him in. The blacks didn’t like her doing that and the whites didn’t like it either, but Waldo loved it because he had a place to live and food to eat. The point I’m making is that there was a mix of so many races in my family that I’ve never been able to understand why some people object to that.

“My tolerance for people who might be against me is a lot greater now than it was when I was young--there was a time when I really rebelled against it,” he continues. “But I know the things I suffered when I was coming up are in me still. When I started writing my last autobiography I was trying to remember and go back for the book, and I began having excruciating dreams several nights a week--dreams so bad they left me afraid to go back to sleep.

“I’ve held a lot of rage inside for a long time, and I guess that’s how it’s coming out, because I’m still having those dreams. The rage is mixed up with a lot of things--the writing, the music, pictures--and I have nightmares of landscapes of fire.

“Nonetheless, if Providence were to grant me another chance and said, ‘We’re gonna make you a rich white boy and send you to Yale,’ I’d still choose the way I came.

“Because what I’ve done is use my emotions for poetry or a novel or film and never let my feelings destroy me.

“Whenever I lecture to kids I always tell them, ‘Hey, if people don’t dislike you because you’re black, they’ll dislike you because you got blue eyes, so all you can do is just forget it. Just waltz around it and fox-trot on back’--that was my father’s saying, and I’ve found it to be good advice.”

* Gordon Parks, “Arias in Silence,” G. Ray Hawkins Gallery, 908 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica. Tuesday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Through Nov. 26. (310) 394-5558.