Gordon Parks – C-VILLE Weekly

Since the 1940s, documentary photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks has remained relevant as both a visual chronicler of injustice and an example to aspiring artists everywhere. “He could turn an ordinary life into something extraordinary,” says John Maggio, the director of A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks, which takes its name from Parks’ memoir.

Among Parks’ famous works is his 1967-68 Life magazine photo documentation of the Fontenelle family’s struggles in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. “Not to diminish the importance of covering the Fontenelle family in a run-down tenement, but he also got the beauty of the composition,” Maggio says.

“Parks is the perfect amalgam of both artist and journalist,” says Maggio, showing a photograph of a woman sitting with some of her children, pleading silently with a poverty bureau worker. “That makes him great. Look at the mother’s eyes—so grave.”

Born into poverty himself, Parks saw power in photography and taught himself how to operate a camera. He worked his way onto the masthead of Life magazine, and was the first African American to shoot for Vogue, as well as the first Black director of a major Hollywood studio movie, Shaft. He also was a noted writer and composed music for films.

In addition to discussing Parks, Maggio’s documentary showcases the trajectories of three newer artists who wield cameras to tell stories. “I didn’t want to keep Gordon encased in amber. I wanted to see his legacy in play today,” says Maggio.

He calls Baltimore’s Devon Allen the nearest extension of Parks. Finding a camera pulled Allen away from a perilous place to the cover of Time magazine. Other artists influenced by Parks and featured in the film are LaToya Ruby Frazier and Jamel Shabazz, who create affirmation in their work, Maggio says.

As a young man hanging around his painter-sculptor father’s studio, Maggio “absconded with a Time-Life photo compendium” that captivated him as he studied Parks and the photos that elicited strong emotions. Today, he says he admires Parks’ bright and colorful series shot in the South. Full of life and joy, the photos defy the harsher stereotypes of the region.

Maggio, who was once a journalist, won an Emmy for “The Untold Story of the 2008 Financial Crisis.” He says now is a golden age for documentaries because of the resources that streaming platforms provide for stories that tell us about our society and world.

Maggio cites the Unite the Right rally as an inspiration for his work on A Choice of Weapons. “There was an eerie intimacy to the tiki-torch march, and it felt like something out of a Nazi propaganda film. It was chilling,” he says, before expressing gratitude for the filmmakers and journalists on the scene at the time. The two days of violence in Charlottesville were part of a pattern that includes the deaths of Sandra Blanton, George Floyd, and others. “The sad part of this is that it’s a conversation we continue to have,” he says, adding that there is still a need for potent imagery, as young artists evolve. “It is their story to tell, the important narrative work that can effect change.”

A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks

October 28

Culbreth Theatre

Elizabeth Meade Howard’s collection offers aging insights

When Elizabeth Meade Howard’s father died at age 90, she found herself adrift without a beacon. Not only had she lost her parent, she’d lost her model for aging well. An award-winning journalist, she began to interview friends, neighbors and professionals she admired—some of them famous—inquiring what aging successfully meant to them. Her quest became the book Aging Famously: Follow Those You Admire to Living Long and Well, due out on September 10. The thesis of the book, she says, “is to look to your own mentors. See how they’re living their later years, and if there’s something good in it, take from that.”

Each chapter distills a single subject’s life into just a few pages, a task that Howard says was most difficult for those she knew well. The self-described “semi-native” encountered some of her subjects in Charlottesville—such as artist Hartwell Priest and Jefferson School teacher Rebecca McGinness, for example. Others she sought out, and some she met through circumstance and persistence, such as the Reverend Jesse Jackson during his visit last month to Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church-Unitarian Universalist in Charlottesville.

While all of the interview subjects are over 60 and many have since died, Aging Famously is not only about aging well, but about living well at any age. Local resident Mary Lee Settle, who quit her job as an editor at Harper’s Bazaar to become a writer, told Howard, “It’s a risk not listening to your soul. …Your job is to take the next step and the next step is always into the dark.” Poet laureate Stanley Kunitz agreed with such persistence but also acknowledged those steps in the dark don’t have to be alone. “It’s very important to feel one’s self as part of the world you live in, and to care about others as well as your own being,” he said.

Walter Cronkite credited his energy to a boundless curiosity, a characteristic, he told Howard, that compelled him to observe his own appendectomy reflected in a mirror. Gordon Parks, the first African-American photographer to work for Life and the first African-American to write and direct a Hollywood film, recognized the necessity of work. He told Howard, “Survival came from working hard. Whatever you want in the world somehow or another comes to you through hard work.” But balance, too, is necessary. Civil rights activist Rosa Parks wrote Howard that to maintain a long life one must “Learn how to rest.”

A theme that arises among the diverging narratives is the importance of creativity. “Aging well requires some imagination,” Howard says, in order to find workable solutions for obstacles such as being unable to drive. All of her subjects, she says, were “mentally flexible and looked at life in a variety of ways.” Their creativity endured despite the effects of health problems, too. “They were not dancing into old age,” Howard says. “But they had enough drive that they plowed through it. And they were gifted in that they had that sense of purpose and curiosity. I think that overrides a lot of pain and loss.”

They also had in common “a certain willingness to take a risk or to be rejected,” she says, such as one subject who revived her acting career in her mid-70s. Howard ponders what might prevent some people from taking such risks, and perfectionism comes to mind. “I’d like to be Joan Didion, but I’m not,” she says. “You have to do it as well as you can do it.”

In interviewing people at this advanced stage of life, Howard found herself bearing witness to her subjects’ love, loss and all that they had survived. Kunitz was in his 90s when she visited, and his wife had recently died. “He was pretty compromised…and sad,” Howard recalls. Afterward, she stood in the hallway and cried “because I thought, ‘This is really an exceptional experience, a sweet time, and it’s not going to happen again.’ I’m not a religious person but it was close to something spiritual.”