marvinjwolf wrote:
Unless you're quite old, or if you have worked as a photojournalist, the name Gordon Parks, Sr., probably won't mean much to you. But if you are an American, and especially an American of color, his work is something you will be glad to know about.
I met him just once when I was a very junior Public Information Officer at Fort Benning in 1967. I was escorting a couple of guys from National Geographic and we had lunch at the Officer's Club. Seemingly out of nowhere, Parks appeared and was invited to join us. I knew who he was, of course, because my road to a commission and a job as an Army Information officer had begun with nearly a year as a combat photographer with the justly famed First Cavalry (Airmobile), and this had brought me into contact with a who's who of the world's finest photojournalists.
Even before that, I spent half a year of evenings in libraries looking at back issues of America's best photo magazines--National Geographic, LIFE, Look, and Pageant.
The most important thing I recall from this chance meeting was that Parks had decided that print photojournalism was walking dead. He had enrolled in film school, and it was his intention to make movies. Which it was and which he did. And more's the pity that weekly magazines like LIFE and LOOK and PAGEANT no longer publish.
Anyhoo, here's a little peek at Gordon Parks and his work:
https://www.google.com/search?gs_ssp=eJzj4tVP1zc0TDbMKyjMS7IwYPSSS88vSsnPUyhILMouVijJSFXIzCvLLM5MyklVyE3MAwBvEBAv&q=gordon%20parks%20the%20invisible%20man&oq=Gordon%20parks%20the%20inv&aqs=chrome.1.0i355i512j46i512j69i57j0i22i30l2j69i60l3.11268j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&fbclid=IwAR1uUqZ4MorAcKSrsuyp0tmxNGTSkfNYsKh2X3JJDZq_2PV1_REq7o3waok
And, more generally:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Parks?fbclid=IwAR2hCoayj9SnheQaIJaakpMAB18tMwYpLHvnEFZklHqOsCHJhhwo7Zy8JcA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Parks?fbclid=IwAR0cTFneJSfoCJCn0N2K6kBpnQUCszNfHVJy7wcAwF54WNkPnF3IpUrI4AY
Unless you're quite old, or if you have worked as ... (
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I too was an Army public information officer in 1971. I was assigned to the Defense Information School (DINFOS) at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana. It was a very intense 12-week course in military communications. We learned radio and TV the first 4 weeks; the people with "on air" backgrounds stayed with that subject. Perhaps you knew Eric Kronaure the main character in the movie "Good Morning Viet Nam. He attended Dinfos about that same time; late 60's. The rest of us then spent the next 8 weeks learning photojournalism. I had a BA in Journalism from OSU upon enlisting into the Army. I remember the name Grodon Parks came many times using his work as examples. His picture was hung on a wall in our darkroom classroom. I think that I really learned more about researching a story and combining pictures than I did at college. I was assigned to the US Army Recruiting Station as an information officer, back my home state of Ohio. I spent the remainder of my enlistment there, it was a great job. I thought about re-enlisting, but was told I'd probably go over-seas for a new assignment, so I got out .