Photographer, filmmaker Gordon Parks dies
Artist chronicled black America for 'Life' magazine, directed movie 'Shaft'
Updated: 10:56 p.m. ET March 7, 2006
NEW YORK - Gordon Parks, who captured the struggles and triumphs of black America as a photographer for Life magazine and then became Hollywood’s first major black director with “The Learning Tree” and the hit “Shaft,” died Tuesday, a family member said. He was 93.
Parks, who also wrote fiction and was an accomplished composer, died in New York, his nephew, Charles Parks, said in a telephone interview from Lawrence, Kan.
“Nothing came easy,” Parks wrote in his autobiography. “I was just born with a need to explore every tool shop of my mind, and with long searching and hard work. I became devoted to my restlessness.”
Story continues
here