Gordon Parks is most famous for being the first black director in Hollywood. But before he made movies and wrote books, he was a poor African American looking for work. When he bought a camera, his life changed forever. He taught himself how to take pictures and before long, people noticed.

Includes several previously unpublished photographs, as well as enhanced reproductions created from Parks's original transparencies.

"There are many forms of art and literature. Learn about Black people who have excelled in literature and the arts, including author Jason Reynolds, dancer Misty Copeland, and painter Kehinde Wiley"--

Gordon Parks is a living legend. At age eighty-four, he can look back on accomplishments in many fields, including fiction, poetry, film, and music. But first and foremost, Parks is a photographer--a man whose indelible photojournalism, including two decades at Life magazine, has made him one of this country's most esteemed image makers. Accompanied throughout by Parks's recollections and reflections, the nearly 300 images collected in Half Past Autumn...

"When Life magazine asked Gordon Parks to illustrate a recurring series of articles on crime in the United States in 1957, he had already been a staff photographer for nearly a decade ... [He] embarked on a six-week journey that took him and a reporter to the streets of New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Unlike much of his prior work, the images made were in color ... Parks rejected clichés of delinquency, drug use, and corruption,...

"The first African American photographer to be hired full time by Life magazine, Gordon Parks was often sent on assignments involving social issues that his white colleagues were not asked to cover. In 1950 he returned on one such assignment to his hometown of Fort Scott in southeastern Kansas: he was to provide photographs for a piece on segregated schools and their impact on black children in the years prior to Brown v. Board of Education. Parks...