Artist/Photographer Gordon Parks By Richard Schulman: Gordon’s favorite portrait by me
Fictional Truths
Many millennia have been tethered to my fictional truths. Like fantastic inventions of the mind, my camera days are bound to dreams. I am a witness to many a way to focus. A witness to discovery. My eyes accompany me as realities and fictions wed. My fictions are the realities that become a turnstile into a secret world. Often in a nightmare of sorts I take a two-step into Arnold Fanck’s frozen cathedral from The Holy Mountain. You toe in and out and begin again. Something to gather might be on the other end. If I am right my sensitive senses will become elevated; if not, all the ice in the world will bury me.
A two-step enables my eyes to flutter and flitter with the light of days ahead and those remembered.
During sessions lasting between one and ten hours, I often morph into my nakedness. I stand on stilts with four paws, relishing the soft downy pulse from downy white grassy African landscape. My family of serval cats roam near my side surrounded by the comforts of the wild. Africa is wide.
The continent’s history breathes fresh ideas into the eyes that search for captures and understandings.
Before I became a photographer, my eyes went wide. A 20mm lens became my identity. Reconnaissance and captures, vistas and textured possibilities filled my dreams in Kodachrome/Fuji-chrome.
There is a moment in the film Black Narcissus when every photographer realizes what it takes to truly become a photographer: The film’s finale showers pellets of rainwater on top of widening vibrant verdant leaves. In that moment, the defining clarity for every camera lens and every still life narrated in color is highlighted exponentially.
I know and have always felt that the meeting of minds and persons is in the most absolute terms a dance. The larger question as with our Fred Astaires and Gene Kellys, is who leads? A good photographer’s eyes are home in a child’s sand-box, a playpen of ideas: Before a photographer enters his/hers own Alice’s Wonderland, a good photographer must discover wanderlust and fairy dust. A camera’s film can be beautifully unique, and unique to beauty. When one lives as an artist and makes memories freshly spoken, the artists’s life of days and nights becomes the making of our dreams.
I have met many famous people who are bloated with confidence; photographers, artists, writers and more. Then I met Gordon Parks and something changed in me. I had been metaphorically traveling on the quadrants of intersected highways, but then the door opened. What anticipation means to one person
is not what it means to another.
This late morning Sunday was a meet and greet between me and Gordon Parks. Before I could doff my hat he asked if I had breakfast. Before I could nod to that he led me into his kitchen and offered me a seat. I am still am not sure if I had more than uttered some nonsense.
I sat down to a fluffy cheese and herb omelet and a tall glass of red Burgundy. About thirty years separated us, and yet, we leaned back in our chairs after the meal as if time belonged to the last two men of the planet. I cannot recall the names and places accurately, but I do know thirty years ago was a lifetime. The hours, minutes and seconds that passed amidst our conversations even before I held my camera changed what I would see almost every day after.
The talk we had that day reminds me like a child’s Pitch Back: that game where you throw the baseball at different angles against a net and depending the angle and velocity the ball would return in an array of different trajectories and paces.
Though I had already spent years photographing portraits and architecture, the moment I left his home, I felt an instantaneous to photograph even more. Parks was no chameleon, he was the Yo-Yo Ma of the camera. The two men have had one great thing in common: The notes and chords of Yo-Yo Ma play like independent captures of film-beautifully with tremendous resonance. The captures by Gordon Parks reveal themselves like independent notes and chords with tremendous resonance. Both men have made something of beauty in each of their days.
Just as Yo-Yo never practiced; because he is performing 364 days a year, Gordon merely made a life in film, photography, art - and music 364 days a year. They are two men I have met and photographed whose lives spread across every day they were alive.
If it is necessary to list the great accomplishments of both men…just ask.
When I returned the following week for my Gordon Parks portrait, he watched me as a salamander eyes its catch. With quiet pleasure he hinted at a question. I reveled in the fact that I was surrounded by a life defined by one man’s quest “to be.” We didn’t speak much for those few hours, but if there is a greater meaning for osmosis, we found it. We shared our thoughts like cave dwellers in awe of ancient scriptures written millions of years before us.
I always imagined Gordon Parks to pass away much like Dylan Thomas’s famous lines,
Perhaps hand in hand with the ticklish White Handed Gibbon. Dylan, Gordon and the ticklish laughter of the White Handed Gibbon. What a match.
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
Dylan Thomas
