Photographer, director ("Shaft") Gordon Parks dies at 93

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

Photographer, director Gordon Parks dies at 93
Life photographer was Hollywood's first major black director

Tuesday, March 7, 2006; Posted: 8:32 p.m. EST (01:32 GMT)

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/03/07/parks.obit.ap/index.html



NEW YORK (AP) -- Gordon Parks, who captured the struggles and triumphs of black America as a photographer for Life magazine and then became Hollywood's first major black director with "The Learning Tree" and the hit "Shaft," died Tuesday, a family member said. He was 93.

Parks, who also wrote fiction and was an accomplished composer, died in New York, his nephew, Charles Parks, said in a telephone interview from Lawrence, Kansas.

"Nothing came easy," Parks wrote in his autobiography. "I was just born with a need to explore every tool shop of my mind, and with long searching and hard work. I became devoted to my restlessness."

He covered everything from fashion to politics to sports during his 20 years at Life, from 1948 to 1968. But as a photographer, he was perhaps best known for his gritty photo essays on the grinding effects of poverty in the United States and abroad and on the spirit of the civil rights movement.