A wonderful assortment of extras pays tribute to Gordon Parks’s breakthrough film.

Based on Gordon Parks’s semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, The Learning Tree unfolds through the eyes of the teenage Newt (Kyle Johnson) as he experiences his first pangs of love and struggles to retain his self-respect and ideals in the face of rampant prejudice. While it’s hardly a radical film in its racial politics, the small-scale, deeply personal drama is compelling in its specificity whenever it homes in on the more quotidian aspects of black lives in rural America that, even today, are rarely glimpsed on screen.

Shaft, the pioneering blaxploitation film directed by Gordon Parks, came out fifty years ago. To commemorate the anniversary, Howard Greenberg Gallery has mounted an exhibition of Parks’s photographs from 1948 through ’67 that purportedly exemplify a “cinematic approach” to the medium and thus foretell the artist’s successful crossover. This conceptual framework is a slippery one—after all, the look of mainstream cinema changed dramatically over that period—but the curatorial gesture is nonetheless productive. Some purists might prefer to keep the artist’s exquisitely composed and carefully printed documentary photographs, many of which he created on assignment for Life magazine, separate from his later sojourn into popular entertainment. This show asks, at least in theory, what we might learn by reappraising the canonical in relation to the mass cultural.

Anthology Film Archives screens a near-complete retrospective of the photographer’s films, including the bio-pic “Leadbelly” and the private-eye thriller “Shaft.”

The photographer Gordon Parks was the first Black director to make a major-studio feature: “The Learning Tree,” from 1969, an autobiographical drama about growing up in Kansas in the nineteen-twenties. It’s screening in Anthology Film Archives’ near-complete retrospective of Parks’s films (through Dec. 11). Also included are the TV movie “Solomon Northup’s Odyssey,” the bio-pic “Leadbelly,” the personal documentary “Moments Without Proper Names,” and, of course, the Harlem-based private-eye thriller “Shaft.”

This documentary celebrates how the work of the great photographer Gordon Parks brought a nuanced fidelity to Black experience.

In one of Gordon Parks’ photographs from 1942, a Black woman named Ella Watson stands erect, staring wearily into the lens. Watson, a widow supporting herself and two grandchildren, is pictured at her place of employment, where she cleans offices. She holds an upright broom in one hand, a mop by the other, in a stance echoing Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” painting. Rather than a rural house behind her, offering support and shelter, she stands before an American flag — the symbol of a country that has slighted her.

Anderson Cooper speaks with LaToya Ruby Frazier and director John Maggio about the new film detailing the life of legendary photographer Gordon Parks.

For its 40th anniversary, the Howard Greenberg Gallery is exhibiting works from Parks’s time at Life magazine documenting the Black experience.

We’re living through a Gordon Parks renaissance. Parks achieved many firsts as an acclaimed Black photographer, writer, musician and film director, making him an obvious figure to celebrate as the art world reckons with racial injustice. 

Gordon Parks’s 1956 photograph of a Black woman and her child beneath a department store sign that reads COLORED ENTRANCE is famous for a reason. It is an elegant image, with a zigzag composition that carefully directs the eye, and yet it is also a painful one because it finds a way of rendering the structural racism of the American South so visibly.

Because this year marks the 50th anniversary of his groundbreaking 1971 film, “Shaft”; because two fine shows of his pioneering photojournalism are currently on view at the Jack Shainman galleries in Chelsea; because a suite from his influential 1957 series, “The Atmosphere of Crime,” is a highlight of “In and Around Harlem,” now on view at the Museum of Modern Art; and because, somehow, despite the long shadow cast by a man widely considered the pre-eminent Black American photographer of the 20th century, he is too little known, the time seems right to revisit some elements of the remarkable life, style and undimmed relevance of Gordon Parks.
 

The Washington Post offers a beautiful and attentive review of Gordon Parks' new book of photography The Atmosphere of Crime: "Parks’s photographs present a more insightful, delicate and disinterested view. They remind us that an atmosphere is not the same as a narrative. One is complex, pervasive, inchoate and, like a fog, it can lift. The other is linear. Like an obsession, it keeps corkscrewing ahead, leaving all kinds of damage in its wake."

A.O. Scott of The New York Times discusses the context and the legacy of Gordon Parks' film The Learning Tree (1969). "The Learning Tree is something else...an absolutely personal film, entwined with its creator’s own experiences, that lays authoritative claim to a place in the American mainstream. At Life (and before that at the New Deal-era Farm Security Administration), Parks was known for his intensive, intimate portraits of housing projects, working-class neighborhoods and poor, rural towns, and there was always a risk, given the institutional whiteness of the Time Life Corporation, that those images could be misinterpreted as exotic. But his aesthetic rigor — the beauty and integrity of those images — ensured that Parks was doing more than explaining black life to white America. He was, like his exact contemporary Ralph Ellison (who grew up one state south of Parks, in Oklahoma, and who like Parks eventually went north) committed to the grand midcentury project of explaining America to itself.