Profile
Gordon Parks
Soccer Player + Photographer + Director
Male
Born
Nov 30, 1912
Hometown
United States
Died
Mar 7, 2006
Death Place
New York City
Nationality
American
For the Scottish sports journalist and former footballer, see Gordon Parks Gordon Parks File:Gordon Parks.
Romance
Check out the latest love interests for Gordon Parks.
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Genevieve YoungMarried 1973 - 1979
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Sally AlvisMarried 1933 - 1961
Timeline
Learn about the memorable moments in the evolution of Gordon Parks.
CHILDHOOD
1912
Birth
Born on November 30, 1912.
TWENTIES
1933
20 Years Old
Parks was married and divorced three times. Parks married Sally Alvis in Minneapolis during 1933 and they divorced in 1961.
1940
27 Years Old
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She encouraged Parks to move to Chicago in 1940, where he began a portrait business and specialized in photographs of society women.
1941
28 Years Old
Over the next few years, Parks moved from job to job, developing a freelance portrait and fashion photographer sideline. He began to chronicle the city's South Side black ghetto and, in 1941, an exhibition of those photographs won Parks a photography fellowship with the Farm Security Administration (FSA).
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THIRTIES
1944
31 Years Old
After the FSA disbanded, Parks remained in Washington, D.C. as a correspondent with the Office of War Information. Finally, disgusted with the prejudice he encountered, however, he resigned in 1944.
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1948
35 Years Old
A 1948 photographic essay on a young Harlem gang leader won Parks a staff job as a photographer and writer with Life magazine.
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FORTIES
1961
48 Years Old
His 1961 photographic essay on a poor Brazilian boy named Flavio da Silva, who was dying from bronchial pneumonia and malnutrition, brought donations from readers that saved the boy's life and paid for a new home for his family.
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1962
49 Years Old
He married Elizabeth Campbell in 1962 and they divorced in 1973. Parks first met Genevieve Young in 1962 when he began writing The Learning Tree. At that time, his publisher assigned her to be his editor. They became romantically involved at a time when they both were divorcing previous mates, and married in 1973. They divorced in 1979.
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FIFTIES
1969
56 Years Old
With his film adaptation of his autobiographical novel, The Learning Tree in 1969, Parks became Hollywood's first major black director.
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1971
58 Years Old
Shaft, a 1971 detective film by Parks starring Richard Roundtree, became a major hit that spawned a series of films that would be labeled as, blaxploitation.
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1972
59 Years Old
Parks also directed the 1972 sequel, Shaft's Big Score, in which the protagonist finds himself caught in the middle of rival gangs of racketeers.
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LATE ADULTHOOD
1979
66 Years Old
Parks fathered four children: Gordon, Jr., David, Leslie, and Toni (Parks-Parsons). His oldest son Gordon Parks, Jr., whose talents resembled his father, was killed in a plane crash in 1979 in Kenya, where he had gone to direct a film.
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In the 1980s, he made several films for television and composed the music and a libretto for Martin, a ballet tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr., which premiered in Washington, D.C. during 1989. It was screened on national television on King's birthday in 1990.
In 2000, as a homage, he had a cameo appearance in the Shaft sequel that starred Samuel L. Jackson in the title role as the namesake and nephew of the original John Shaft.
2006
93 Years Old
Died on March 7, 2006.
Original Authors of this text are noted on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Parks.
Text is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
Text is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.