Half past autumn

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 century's most esteemed image makers. Accompanied throughout by Parks's recollections and reflections, the nearly 300 images collected in Half Past Autumn give us the full measure of this photographer's achievements for the first time. In the early 1940s, Parks launched his career with a remarkable array of documentary images for the Historical Section of the Farm Security Administration, including his unforgettable American Gothic photograph of Ella Watson, a black charwoman in Washington, D.C. During the same period, Parks landed fashion assignments at Vogue (Harper's Bazaar had rejected him because they wouldn't hire blacks), which paved the way for his later forays into the world of Parisian haute couture.