Product Description

In Eyes with Winged Thoughts, the forty-four photographs and fifty-eight poems, reflecting on his long and extraordinary life, offer a rare glimpse of his thoughts and feelings about everything from romantic love to the Iraq war and the passing of Pope John Paul II.

He has done it all. Gordon Parks's life is an astonishing litany of firsts: in the 1940s he was the first African-American photographer to work for the Farm Security Administration and for Vogue and Life magazines; in the 1960s he would become the first African-American director of a major motion picture. A dominating figure in contemporary American culture, he is an artist of uncompromising vision and creativity.

In 2002 Parks received the Jackie Robinson Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award and was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame, just the latest in a series of honors that began when he received a prestigious Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1941 and which now includes an Emmy, a National Medal of the Arts, and over fifty honorary doctorates. Now in his nineties, he could easily rest on his laurels, but the luminous photographs on display in Eyes with Winged Thoughts and the poems -- some meditative and lyrical, some raw with emotion about the war in Iraq and the tragedy of the tsunami -- show that he is still a true American Renaissance man.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #681632 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 128 pages

From Publishers Weekly
With more than 60 years behind the lens, including a stint as a New Deal documentarian and more than two decades at Life magazine, Parks is by acclamation the nation's most important African-American photographer. Film fans know him as the man who directed Shaft, along with several other feature films and well-regarded documentaries, many of them focused on black urban life. Meant to accompany A Hungry Heart, his fourth prose memoir (also a November book), this collection of Parks's straightforward, sincere verse plays up its links with his pictures, almost 50 of which adorn the book, from abstract photos of crystals and sunsets to closeups of soldiers and candids of people in need. The verse itself consists of clear and sometimes moving meditations on Parks's upbringing ("Momma's words refuse to die./ Instead they grow wings and soar"), on American history and on current events ("Forty killed in Basra today! Small children blown apart!") along with pithy advice from a now 90-year-old working artist: "Keep acting and thinking upward." (Nov.)
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From Booklist
Gordon Parks is remarkable: a Renaissance man who has mastered photography, filmmaking, and writing. The story of his life is certainly an incredible one, which explains why Parks has written a new memoir titled A Hungry Heart (2005). This collection of poems and photographs, however, will add yet another dimension to Parks' life story. From the resonant words and lessons of his parents to meditations on current events--terrorism, the tsunami, the war in Iraq--the poems are candid snapshots of Parks' emotional life. Words harmonize with landscape photographs and images of strangers walking through their lives without a sense of being observed. Transcending voyeurism, Parks' photographs reveal vulnerabilities of the human experience with grace and compassion. After all, Parks understands vulnerability and willingly displays it in his writing. In his 90s and still driven to experience what the world has to offer, and to express his response to it, Gordon Parks is an inspiration to us all. Janet St. John
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
Gordon Parks's retrospective book of art photography, Half Past Autumn, published in 1997, coincided with an exhibition organized by the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., which traveled in the United States from that year until 2003, and an HBO documentary that aired on November 30, 2000. He has authored numerous books of art, fiction, memoir (including A Star for Noon), photographs, and a CD of his music (2000). He published The Learning Tree, a novel, in 1963, and three previous autobiographies, A Choice of Weapons, To Smile in Autumn, and Voices in the Mirror. He died in March 2006 at his home in Manhattan. He was 93.

Customer Reviews

A Genius Distilled into Fearless Images & Words
Gordon Parks is a national treasure. That surely isn't news. But of all his many volumes (not to mention films, symphonies, photos, journalism, and on and on) this slender and profound volume stands alone in its fearlessness, poetic and heartbreaking beauty, and its unflinching spareness. If not for the wisdom and gravity of his words and images, one would think that the sheer spareness of this book came from a young firebrand. Timeless!

He speaks of war, peace, empathy. On a more personal note, there is love: Love of family, friends, the beauty of the world we live in despite -- and sometimes because of -- the squalor or desperate circumstances that coexist with being human.

If you never buy another Gordon Parks book, or if you just aren't up to a physically "big" book right now, treat yourself to this. It will be among one of the truly BIGGEST books you will ever luxuriate in.

RIp to a American Treasure
Gordon Parks to Me was the Black Andy Warhol. He truly was a Man who was always Hip&Knew what was happening. He was the Pulse of Life in America.Gordon Parks captured so many things through life be it through Photo,Poems,His Films,etc... this Book captures the full beauty of life,Liberty. the Man had a Zest for so much&it comes through loud&Clear in his work. He was a true Pioneer.

Eyes with Winged Thoughts: Poems and Photographs
I've been an admirer of Gordon Parks for some years. This was a replacement copy of his book - my first copy was loaned out and never returned.

His poems are wonderful in their simplicity and perception. One need not be of African descent to appreciate his words and be stirred by them. It is comforting to me that a human being named Gordon Parks exists and has shared himself with us, to our betterment.