A man in full: the rich life of Gordon Parks

What sort of hero claws his way out of poverty through fashion photography?

What kind of social crusader puts in 20 years as a gritty documentarian for Life magazine, then turns to directing “Shaft” movies?

Who starts as youngest of 15 kids in Fort Scott, Kan., drops out of high school, takes a job as a whorehouse piano player -- then winds up an honored artist with a king’s roost in a Manhattan high-rise?

In 93 years of life that ended in New York on Tuesday, Gordon Parks, image-maker, storyteller and African American polymath, made himself the implausible answer to all those questions.

For all the attention his photographs and film work have received, those who have followed his work closely say, the most remarkable thing about Parks is that he came from nowhere with not just one improbable ambition but a whole mixed bag of them, and then advanced them all.

The documentarian was also a fantasist. The civil-rights crusader liked to live high and got rich on an Afro-intensive ghetto action flick. The image-maker liked to moonlight as an author, a poet, a composer. And the influences he left behind had the same crossover elements: Just ask the Getty curator who raves about “Shaft,” or John Singleton, the up-from-the-hood film director who not only remade “Shaft” in 2000 but now is learning his way around a Leica still camera.

“He would always say: ‘Do everything,’ ” Singleton said Thursday.

Among the other cinematic names swimming in Parks’ wake, there’s Spike Lee, who has counted Parks among his favorite directors, and Denzel Washington, who co-produced “Half Past Autumn,” a 2000 television documentary about Parks.

“It’s unusual for someone who’s driven visually to also be driven by words and sounds and not be a dilettante at any of them,” said Weston Naef, photography curator at the Getty Museum, who has been trying for months to acquire some of Parks’ work for the museum. “He has this continuous moving back and forth between the factual and real and a kind of dreamy abstraction.”

Raised in Kansas and Minneapolis, Parks never made it through high school. After a series of colorful jobs, he bought his first camera in his mid-20s in a Seattle pawnshop. To get his first professional assignment, he talked his way into a job doing fashion photography for a department store in St. Paul.

From there, Parks found his way into the Farm Security Administration, where a generation of top-notch documentarians were learning their craft, and then to Life magazine. Neither place had seen an African American staff photographer before. In two decades at Life, he worked on topics as varied as Brazilian street urchins, fashion, the early growth of Islam among African Americans, and portrait work among the rich and famous.

Throughout, he seemed to move with equal ease among the privileged and the disenfranchised -- and he never lost enthusiasm for either territory.

“By being able to move back and forth between different worlds, he could say more about the world in general,” said Philip Brookman, senior curator of photography and media arts at the Corcoran Gallery, who organized a 1997 Park retrospective that toured the country.

Unless you count his brief stint as a whorehouse pianist in the ‘40s, it was in the early 1960s that Parks’ multiple talents became widely evident. With 15 years at Life under his belt, he published an autobiographical novel, “The Learning Tree.” Six years later he won broad praise for a film version of the story -- the first major Hollywood film written, directed and produced by an African American. (He also served as cinematographer and composed the music.) This led to his next film, 1971’s “Shaft,” followed by “Shaft’s Big Score” a year later, and the often-overlooked biopic “Leadbelly” in 1976.

Scores of further projects in sundry disciplines followed, including several memoirs. The most recent, “A Hungry Heart,” published by Atria Books, was welcomed into print by a New York Times reviewer in January.

“He grew up in an environment of poverty and racism,” Brookman said, “and from that he developed a mission for his life: to fight against the things that stood in his way as a young person. His life was really about that -- using art as a weapon to fight poverty and racism.”

Through a decade of friendship and collaboration with Parks, Brookman said, he came to realize that Parks was all about storytelling -- not just in the way he assembled films, photo essays and narratives about others but in crafting his own persona. “The stories really became paramount,” Brookman said. “Sometimes the stories he told were not the true story but worked very well to help with his mission.”

When researching the retrospective, Brookman would occasionally bump up against facts at odds with Parks’ recollections. He would approach the artist with these discrepancies, Brookman said, “and he would just kind of smile and say, ‘You’re probably right.’ His memories, I think, changed to become what he wanted them to become. He sort of became the story that he was telling.”

Meanwhile, curators like the Getty’s Naef will likely be queuing up to take on parts of Parks’ legacy. “He’s certainly not as well represented here as he should be,” Naef said. And anyone who thinks “Shaft” is a simple piece of “blaxploitation,” Naef added, should look again.

With Parks bringing all his documentary experience to bear on the location photography and casting, Naef said, “these people look so real. They are not fictional, idealized black people.” And in its positioning as a contemporary moral fable, he added, “it almost anticipates ‘The Godfather.’ ”

Singleton said he was about 4 when he saw “Shaft” in the Baldwin Theater on La Brea. “And later on, once I was aspiring to be a director and figuring out that it was a white-male-dominated thing, the only person I could point to who’d had a career in making films was Gordon Parks.”

The two met at the California African American Museum in Exposition Park about 13 years ago and developed an enduring friendship. But the awe, Singleton said, never quite went away.

In 1997, “I had a screening of my movie ‘Rosewood’ in New York, and I was really nervous to sit next to him watching the movie. I kept watching his face, watching the movie.” Afterward, Parks gave Singleton the thumbs-up, and the young director’s tension melted away.

“He was very genuine, and generous,” Singleton said. “If any of us can live half the life Gordon Parks lived creatively -- well, then that’s a life well lived.”