Pictures of the Day: Democratic Republic of Congo and Elsewhere

In order to view this feature, you must download the latest version of flash player here.

#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}

Photos from Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Lebanon and Turkey.

Follow Lens on Facebook and Twitter.

The Fashionable Mr. Parks

In order to view this feature, you must download the latest version of flash player here.

#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}

Today is the centennial of Gordon Parks's birth in Kansas. From humble roots, he taught himself photography and in turn taught America about the African-American experience. A man of many firsts - the first African-American staff photographer for Life, the first African-American to direct a major motion picture - he was as prolific as he was talented.

Deborah Willis, the chairwoman of the Photography and Imaging Department at New York University, was inspired early on by Parks, whom she later befriended. In an essay for Lens, she looks back at an aspect of his career that some may find surprising - his work as a fashion photographer.

In the early 1960s, I sat in my mother's beauty shop in North Philadelphia reading Life magazine and discovered the photographs of Gordon Parks. I wasn't even a teenager, yet I still remember vividly the effect those photo essays had on my life: over the course of the next decade I read his autobiography, “A Choice of Weapons,” and devoured almost all of his stories in Life.

I was determined that I would also become a photographer.

In 1974, while I was studying photography at the Philadelphia College of Art, I finally met Parks. My first interview with him focused on his early years as a photographer - a career that began when he bought a Voigt länder Brillant and took pictures along the North Coast Limited rail line, where he worked as a waiter.

“How did you make it happen?” I asked.

I still recall his smile, and his embrace of my naïve question.

Over the course of 70 prolific years, Parks made many things happen - being a member of the Farm Security Administration's roster of documentary photographers, directing movies like “The Learning Tree” and “Shaft,” and being a co-founder of Essence magazine. In his last memoir, he recalled the lessons his father taught him, mere months before his 15th birthday and the death of his mother.

“Your heart will tell your feet which roads to take,” his father counseled. “There'll be signposts along the way giving out directions. You'll have the right to question them, but don't ignore them. Each one is meant for something.”

One of those signposts guided him to fashion photography. Early on, Parks was well aware of how fashion a nd design shaped ideas about femininity and desire. Vogue was among the magazines he read closely after passengers left copies behind in the rail cars along the route between Chicago and Seattle. Those magazines guided him as he taught himself to make photographs that engaged a wide variety of people.

With a clear understanding about how to “look” on city streets, in cafes and society balls, Parks's fashion photographs are about the experience of being dressed. He communicated beauty, vanity and pleasure in his photographs of fashionably dressed women, which began with his first assignment in St. Paul at Frank Murphy's Women's Clothing Store. His first wife, Sally, who was a designer and often modeled for him, also may have inspired his interest in fashion.

Gordon Parks, courtesy the Gordon Parks Foundation Cuba, 1958

Even from the beginning, Parks challenged prevailing rules about how to photograph fashion, including objects, group poses and streetscapes that beckoned with the allure of a desired lifestyle or career. He devised both dramatic and subtle poses for the models, who wore suits, dresses, coats and hats from new collections. He placed them in the studio and on location in Chicago, Paris and New York, using realistic scenes and the city as backdrops.

His photographs suggested that he caught his subjects off guard and midaction, as if they were waiting for a bus, in the middle of a shopping trip or expecting a lunch date. Parks captured these casual moments with a sense of intimacy and awareness. The viewer imagined the moment, which was framed dramatically, as if part of a narrative.

Parks's models appear uninterested, but we know that they are aware of the came ra's eye and that they have been caught in the moment. He photographed them amid the activity of city life - walking, lunching and daydreaming - and all viewed from a relatively close distance. Parks was aware of societal dress codes and the designers' messages about the female body. The models' poses, though subtle, provoke ideas about desire and the idealized body.

When he looked back on his fashion assignments, Parks revealed a sharp eye not just for photography, but for the designer's craft, too.

“Chanel's clothes are comfortable and easy to move in, and her suits are classics,” he wrote in “Voices in the Mirror,” his autobiography. “Molyneux designs for elegance and grace, and his things are very fluid. Schiaparelli is famous for crazy buttons and shocking pinks, and loves to play with different colors. Dior's gowns are very feminine and he's well known for creating the New Look. Balenciaga works for perfection, whether it's an evening dress, suit or coat. … Jacques Fath is all discretion, but his things can be very witty and sexy. His evening dresses are extremely flirtatious.”

Parks's importance to fashion photography is now beyond question. He challenged the genre by inventing ways to enrich our ideas about style. Ultimately, his fashion photography and writings on fashion were simply informed by beauty.

He affectionately remembered those experiences - even with their unexpected contrasts - as he culled photographs for his 1997 retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery, “Half Past Autumn,” which I curated with Philip Brookman. I remember looking through stacks of photographs as Parks shared stories from fashion to poverty.

“I had been given assignments I had never expected to earn,” Parks said. “Some proved to be as different as silk and iron. Once, crime and fashion was served to me on the same day. The color of a Dior gown I photographed one afternoon turned out to be the same color as the blood of a murdered gang member I had photographed earlier that morning up in Harlem.”

Gordon Parks, courtesy the Gordon Parks Foundation Maximilian Alaska seal fur. New York, 1948.

A five-volume collection of Gordon Parks's work is forthcoming from Steidl.

Follow Lens on Facebook and Twitter.