NEW YORK - Gordon Parks, who captured the struggles and triumphs of black America as a photographer for Life magazine and then became Hollywood’s first major black director with “The Learning Tree” and the hit “Shaft,” died Tuesday, a family member said. He was 93.Parks, who also wrote fiction and was an accomplished composer, died in New York, his nephew, Charles Parks, said in a telephone interview from Lawrence, Kan.
“Nothing came easy,” Parks wrote in his autobiography. “I was just born with a need to explore every tool shop of my mind, and with long searching and hard work. I became devoted to my restlessness.”

He covered everything from fashion to politics to sports during his 20 years at Life, from 1948 to 1968.

But as a photographer, he was perhaps best known for his gritty photo essays on the grinding effects of poverty in the United States and abroad and on the spirit of the civil rights movement.

“Those special problems spawned by poverty and crime touched me more, and I dug into them with more enthusiasm,” he said. “Working at them again revealed the superiority of the camera to explore the dilemmas they posed.”

In 1961, his photographs in Life of a poor, ailing Brazilian boy named Flavio da Silva brought donations that saved the boy and purchased a new home for him and his family.

Moving on to movies
“The Learning Tree” was Parks’ first film, in 1969. It was based on his 1963 autobiographical novel of the same name, in which the young hero grapples with fear and racism as well as first love and schoolboy triumphs. Parks wrote the score as well directed.




This 1968 file photo shows photographer Gordon Parks, right, and his son Gordon, Jr. on location during the filming of "The Learning Tree."

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In 1989, “The Learning Tree” was among the first 25 American movies to be placed on the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. The registry is intended to highlight films of particular cultural, historical or aesthetic importance.
The detective drama “Shaft,” which came out in 1971 and starred Richard Roundtree, was a major hit and spawned a series of black-oriented films. Parks himself directed a sequel, “Shaft’s Big Score,” in 1972, and that same year his son Gordon Jr. directed “Superfly.” The younger Parks was killed in a plane crash in 1979.
Parks also published books of poetry and wrote musical compositions including “Martin,” a ballet about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Parks was born Nov. 30, 1912, in Fort Scott, Kan., the youngest of 15 children. In his 1990 autobiography, “Voices in the Mirror,” he remembered it as a world of racism and poverty, but also a world where his parents gave their children love, discipline and religious faith.

A used camera from a pawn shop
He went through a series of jobs as a teen and young man, including piano player and railroad dining car waiter. The breakthrough came when he was about 25, when he bought a used camera in a pawn shop for $7.50. He became a freelance fashion photographer, went on to Vogue magazine and then to Life in 1948.
“Reflecting now, I realize that, even within the limits of my childhood vision, I was on a search for pride, meanwhile taking measurable glimpses of how certain blacks, who were fed up with racism, rebelled against it,” he wrote.
When he accepted an award from Wichita State University in May 1991, he said it was “another step forward in my making peace with Kansas and Kansas making peace with me.”

“I dream terrible dreams, terribly violent dreams,” he said. “The doctors say it’s because I suppressed so much anger and hatred from my youth. I bottled it up and used it constructively.”

In his autobiography, he recalled that being Life’s only black photographer put him in a peculiar position when he set out to cover the civil rights movement. “Life magazine was eager to penetrate their ranks for stories, but the black movement thought of Life as just another white establishment out of tune with their cause,” he wrote. He said his aim was to become “an objective reporter, but one with a subjective heart.”

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