Life as we know it essays

Life as we know it essays Gordon Parks was born in Fort Scott, Kansas in 1912, the youngest of sixteen children. Before making it as a successful photographer he went through many tough times. As his mother told him before her death. Make a man of yourself up there. Put something in to it, and youll get something out of it (Gibney). The weapons Parks used to get through life were poetry, music, and photography. Those were the weapons I used to fight racism, bigotry, and poverty in America. My advice to young people, especially Black people, is to not let the enemy use you (Gibney). As an aspiring artist he supported himself by working as a piano player, busboy, basketball player and Civilian Conservation Corpsman. He attended St. Paul Central High School working towards a diploma he never received. It was being a bus boy at the Lowry Hotel that exposed him to powerful people and new ideas. The Lowry Hotel was where influential band leaders of the time heard Parks compositions, and later performed them for lon ger audiences. At the age of twenty-five, he began to seriously consider a career in the direction of photography. Gordon Parks often created works of art centered around real life things due to how he grew up and what he was raised around, he wanted to express his life through his work. Inexperienced but ambitious, Parks first big break in professional photography came when he convinced Frank Murphys wifes clothing store in Saint Paul, Minnesota to let him try his hand at fashion photographs. In 1941, he became the first photographer to receive a fellowship from the Julius Rosenwald Foundation. While Parks was working as a waiter on the Northern Pacific Railroad, he ran into a magazine and was introduced to photographers such as Ben Shahn, Jack Delano, Carl Mydans, Dorothea Lange, John Vachon, and Walker Evans. They were photographing poverty, and I knew poverty so well, Parks recalls (...