The Fourth Seat: Gordon Parks
What Gordon Parks Saw
A SEAT ON THE SHELF 004
On Gordon Parks, the power of looking closely, the stories inside the frame, and choosing a tool capable of changing the conversation.
There is a photograph of Ella Watson standing in front of an American flag.
She wears a dark dress and round glasses. In one hand is a mop. Beside her is a broom. The flag hangs behind her, its stripes falling vertically through the frame.
Gordon Parks made the photograph in Washington, D.C., in 1942.
It would become one of the most recognizable images of his career.
But he did not stop there.
He followed Watson home.
He photographed her family. Her neighborhood. Her church. The rooms she moved through when she was no longer standing beneath that flag with cleaning tools in her hands.
He stayed.
And because he stayed, the woman inside that famous photograph was allowed to become more than the photograph.
That may be one of the most important things Gordon Parks left us.
Not simply how to look.
How to look again.
The weapon he chose
Parks did not begin with much.
Born in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912, the youngest of fifteen children, he came of age in an America that had already decided plenty about what a Black boy could expect from it.
He worked the jobs available to him. Waiter. Porter. Piano player.
Then he encountered photographs of migrant workers in a magazine.
Something about them stayed with him.
Parks bought his first camera from a pawnshop and taught himself how to use it.
Eventually, he would describe the camera as his weapon of choice against racism, poverty, and injustice.
I keep returning to that phrase.
Weapon of choice.
Because a camera cannot decide where to point itself.
Someone has to choose.
What enters the frame.
What stays outside it.
Who deserves another photograph.
Who deserves another hour.
Who gets shown at their worst.
Who gets the dignity of being complicated.
Parks chose his camera.
And then he decided what kind of photographer he would become while holding it.
The person beyond the story
In 1948, Parks went to Harlem to photograph gang violence.
There was already a story America knew how to tell about a seventeen-year-old Black gang leader.
His name was Leonard “Red” Jackson.
Parks could have arrived, photographed the violence and gone home.
Instead, before he ever asked Red if he could photograph him, Parks spent time with him.
They drove through Harlem together.
Parks learned the boundaries between rival gangs. He listened. He watched. He began to understand the world Red was moving through before trying to explain that world to somebody else.
Then he picked up the camera.
There are photographs of violence from that assignment.
There are also photographs of Red sitting.
Thinking.
Holding a child.
Being seventeen.
That distinction matters.
Because there is a difference between documenting what happened to someone and documenting who they are.
Parks understood that a person could be standing inside poverty without poverty being the entirety of the person.
A teenager could belong to a gang without “gang member” being sufficient explanation for a life.
A woman could clean government offices without a mop becoming the most interesting thing about her.
Years later, he would photograph an extended Black family living under Jim Crow in Alabama.
There were signs telling them where they could enter.
Separate counters.
Separate waiting rooms.
An entire system designed to make Black people smaller.
Parks photographed those things.
But he also photographed the family living.
Children dressed for an outing.
Women talking.
Men working.
People going somewhere.
People coming home.
The cruelty of segregation sat inside the photographs beside something it could not erase:
a life.
What happens when people can see
Parks photographed the Fontenelle family in Harlem in 1967.
Bessie and Norman Fontenelle were raising their children in severe poverty. Their apartment was cold. Food was scarce. Their children sometimes slept beneath coats for warmth.
Those facts could have been written in a report.
Parks gave them faces.
A mother.
A father.
Children.
A home.
The photographs appeared in Life, and readers responded. They sent money, food and clothing. Enough was raised to move the family into a house.
Then the house burned.
Norman Fontenelle Sr. and their son Kenneth died.
There is no beautiful way to resolve that.
There shouldn't be.
The camera had made people care.
It had moved them to act.
It could not promise what happened next.
That, too, is part of the responsibility of storytelling.
We can enter someone's life.
We can document it carefully.
We can help other people see it.
We cannot turn another person's life into a clean ending simply because a clean ending would make the story easier to carry.
More than one way to tell it
Parks never belonged entirely to photography.
He wrote novels and memoirs.
He composed music.
He made films.
In 1969, he adapted his novel The Learning Tree for the screen, becoming the first Black director of a major Hollywood studio film. Two years later came Shaft.
The form changed.
The instinct did not.
There was a story.
Parks found the tool that could carry it.
That may be why his influence reaches so far beyond the photographs themselves.
In A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks, photographers and filmmakers including Devin Allen, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Jamel Shabazz and Ava DuVernay consider what Parks made possible for the storytellers who followed him.
He did not simply leave photographs behind.
He left evidence that a Black storyteller could pick up a tool, point it toward the world as he understood it, and insist that other people look.
Then somebody else picked up theirs.
The tool in my hand
I use a pen.
I don't say that because I have mistaken my work for Gordon Parks's.
I say it because I recognize the decision underneath his.
Choose a tool.
Learn what it can do.
Then decide what you are going to do with it.
A pen can flatten someone just as easily as a camera can.
It can sensationalize.
It can reduce a person to the worst thing that happened to them.
It can turn somebody's pain into a headline and move on.
It can also stay.
It can ask another question.
It can notice what was sitting on the table.
It can ask about the woman in the photograph instead of simply using the photograph.
It can make room for contradiction.
It can preserve something that might otherwise disappear.
I think that is what I recognize in Parks.
Not sameness.
Responsibility.
Because here, in The Living Room, we believe ordinary lives are worth documenting before anybody else decides they are important.
The grandmother whose name will never appear in a history book.
The woman retiring after decades of going to work.
The person still becoming who they are.
The family photograph somebody almost threw away.
The story everyone at the table knows but nobody has written down.
We don't have to wait for history to tell us what mattered.
We can pay attention now.
Look again
This October, The Living Room is considering the conversations that changed us.
Parks reminds us that not every conversation begins with somebody speaking.
Sometimes a photograph enters the room first.
America could talk about poverty.
Parks showed the Fontenelles.
America could talk about segregation.
Parks showed the people living beneath its signs.
America could talk about juvenile delinquency.
Parks showed Red Jackson.
He put people back inside conversations that had learned how to discuss them without really seeing them.
And once people can see differently, they may begin to speak differently too.
That is why Gordon Parks takes The Fourth Seat.
Not only because of the photographs he made.
Not only because of the films, books, music, or doors he opened.
But because he understood what can happen when a storyteller pays close enough attention to another human being.
He chose the camera.
Here, we choose the pen.
Different tools.
The same question waits for anyone who picks one up:
Where will you point it?
Parks spent a lifetime answering.
Toward the people.
And then he stayed long enough for us to see them.