Providing a unique view of American life during the Great Depression and Second World War, each Fields of Vision volume includes an introduction to the life of the photographer and 50 evocative images selected from their work. Gordon Parks was born in 1912 in Fort Scott, Kansas, the youngest of fifteen children in a poor tenant-farming family. He was working odd jobs in Minnesota when he saw the work of FSA photographers in a magazine and was inspired to buy a camera. Parks' early pictures landed him a position as Roy Stryker's apprentice in 1942. Among his extraordinary FSA photos is "American Gothic," which shows charwoman Ella Watson posed with mop and broom against an American flag. After the FSA, Parks worked at Life magazine. He also became a respected writer and film director. He died in 2006. "Despite the racial pressures, what I had learned within the year [at FSA] outdistanced the bigotry I encountered? . I had been forced to take a hard look backward at black history; to realize the burdens of those who had lived through it." Gordon Parks "Clearly, the life of Gordon Parks was washed by all waters. He leaves a legacy that is luminous for its prodigious creativity and contributions to American culture, for at no time during his inspiring odyssey did Parks lose sight of our shared humanity." Charles Johnson on Gordon Parks AUTHOR: Dr. Charles Johnson is a novelist, essayist, literary critic, short-story writer, cartoonist, and professor emeritus at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is a MacArthur Fellow and the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature and a National Book Award for his novel Middle Passage. ILLUSTRATIONS: 55 photographs
