Gordon Parks Quotes
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You know, the camera is not meant just to show misery.
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I suffered first as a child from discrimination, poverty ... So I think it was a natural follow from that that I should use my camera to speak for people who are unable to speak for themselves.
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If you don't have anything to say, your photographs aren't going to say much.
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I do find a certain fascination with the unpredictable. The transitory years we wade through are what they are- what we make of them.
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I had known poverty firsthand, but there I learned how to fight its evil - along with the evil of racism - with a camera.
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If a man can reach the latter days of his life with his soul intact, he has mastered life.
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Success can be wracking and reproachful, to you and those close to you. It can entangle you with legends that are consuming and all but impossible to live up to.
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I have been born again and again and each time, I have found something to love.
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Washington, D.C. in 1942 was not the easiest place in the world for a Negro to get along.
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But I was very disappointed that I didn't get a chance to go overseas with that group, might not have gotten back but I wanted very much to go because there's not much of a record of the exploits of the first Negro fighter group.
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Enthusiasm is the electricity of life
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You know, the camera is not meant just to show misery. You can show things that you like about the universe, things that you hate about the universe. It's capable of doing both.
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I think most people can do a whole lot more if they just try.
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The guy who takes a chance, who walks the line between the known and unknown, who is unafraid of failure, will succeed.
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I picked up a camera because it was my choice of weapons against what I hated most about the universe: racism, intolerance, poverty.
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So I went to Chicago in 1940, I think, '41, and the photographs that I made there, aside from fashion, were things that I was trying to express in a social conscious way.
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I've known both misery and happiness, lived in so many different skins it is impossible for one skin to claim me. And I have felt like a wayfarer on an alien planet at times - walking, running, wondering about what brought me to this particular place, and why. But once I was here the dreams started moving in, and I went about devouring them as they devoured me.
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I picked up a camera because it was my choice of weapons against what I hated most about the universe: racism, intolerance, poverty. I could have just as easily picked up a knife or a gun, like many of my childhood friends did... most of whom were murdered or put in prison... but I chose not to go that way. I felt that I could somehow subdue these evils by doing something beautiful that people recognize me by, and thus make a whole different life for myself, which has proved to be so.
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Nothing came easy. I was just born with a need to explore every part of my mind. And with long searching and hard work, I became devoted to my restlessness.
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I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs. I knew at that point I had to have a camera.
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I'd become sort of involved in things that were happening to people. No matter what color they be, whether they be Indians, or Negroes, the poor white person or anyone who was I thought more or less getting a bad shake.
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And I think that after nearly 85 years upon this planet that I have a right after working so hard at showing the desolation and the poverty, to show something beautiful for somebody as well.
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The photographer begins to feel big and bloated and so big he can't walk through one of these doors because he gets a good byline; he gets notices all over the world and so forth; but they're really - the important people are the people he photographs.
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Many times I wondered whether my achievement was worth the loneliness I experienced, but now I realize the price was small.
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I have always felt as though I needed a weapon against evil.
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I've been with Life now for seventeen years and I have written several articles for them and will be doing more writing and do at least two assignments a year besides my writing.
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But I do feel a little teeny right now that I'm just about ready to start, and winter is entering. Half past autumn has arrived.
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Enthusiasm is the electricity of life. How do you get it? You act enthusiastic until you make it a habit.
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Think in terms of images and words. They can be mighty powerful when they are fitted together properly.
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I feel it is the heart, not the eye, that should determine the content of the photograph. What the eye sees is its own. What the heart can perceive is a very different matter.
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