Gordon Parks (1912-2006)

Listening to npr on my drive to work this morning I learned that Gordon Parks died yesterday at age 93. As a photographer, Parks is maybe most famous for this 1942 portrait of Ella Watson taken as part of a project for an, initially at least, very reluctant FSA.

Watson was at the time a cleaning woman in the building that housed the FSA offices in Washington. Parks, of course, went on to have a distinguished photographic career. And this was merely the begininng for a man who also became an accomplished film director (e..g., the original Shaft) , fiction writer and composer.