An eye for beauty, a passion for truth

DURHAM -- At this point, the photographs aren't on the walls. They're lined up on the floor, leaning against the wall. But even at knee level, the impact is there.

Kenneth G. Rodgers, director of the N.C. Central University Art Museum, strolls through the gallery Monday afternoon, surveying the photographs and taking in the mastery. He picks up a framed picture of a respectable, impeccably dressed black couple, presumably going to church if the Bible under the man's right arm is any indication. Rodgers turns the photo around to see the label, and sure enough it says, "Husband and Wife, Sunday Morning, Fort Scott, 1949."

"That's certainly typical about couples in America," says Rodgers, admiring the photo's bare-bones honesty, "especially black America."

"Husband and Wife" and 44 other prints go on display today in "Gordon Parks: Crossroads," an exhibit that has been touring museums, galleries and universities since April. The retrospective spans Parks' career from his work with the Farm Security Administration to the painterly abstracts from the 1990s.

In his work for the FSA in Washington, D.C., Parks captured such striking and racially charged images as 1942's "American Gothic," his first professional photograph, with black cleaning lady Ella Watson holding a mop and a broom in front of the U.S. flag. As a photographer for Life magazine, he snapped everything from the Black Panthers to the Nation of Islam, from Muhammad Ali to Duke Ellington, from Chicago detectives raiding an apartment to gang members mourning a slain member in his coffin. Parks' photographic record is practically a humanistic history of 20th-century America.

"He gives this vision of America, not just black America -- but poor, white America as well," Rodgers says, pointing out a 1943 photograph of a white New England family.

Rodgers began his pursuit of "Crossroads" two years ago, and he's not the only one who's excited about its arrival. He mentions an English class at another college that studied one of Parks' most notable (and most powerful) photo essays, about a poor, 12-year-old Brazilian boy named Flavio da Silva.

While shooting the Brazilian slums for Life in 1961, Parks mostly focused on Flavio, who was dying of tuberculosis. After the piece ran, Life readers sent in money (about $30,000, Parks has said) for the boy's medical care. Parks brought the boy to America -- a move doctors said would kill him -- and after two years, he was cured. When he returned to Brazil, Parks bought Flavio's father a new truck, and Life donated $25,000 for a new home. In the 2000 documentary, "Half Past Autumn: The Life and Works of Gordon Parks," Parks went back to Brazil to visit the boy he helped save, now a full-grown family man.

Renaissance man

Parks changed the lives of many people in the 93 years he existed on this earth. He contributed to nearly every aspect of American popular culture.

He was a musician, an author, a poet, a painter and a filmmaker as well as a photographer. He was the first African-American to helm a major motion picture, "The Learning Tree," which was adapted from his own 1963 autobiography of the same name. He was Life magazine's first African-American photographer, but he also shot fashion for Vogue and Glamour. He served as editorial director for Essence the first three years of its publication. He was a multifaceted trailblazer whose career is a shining example of black perseverance in American society.

Native Texan Jason Woods is angling to be the renaissance man Parks was. A DJ and producer for the Houston hip-hop collective Hueston Independent Spit District, Woods is also a shutterbug who goes by the name Flash Gordon Parks. Following the style of Parks' starkest, most profound work, he captured black-and-white images of the predominantly black residents of Houston's Third Ward district and published them in "The Beautiful Side of Ugly," a 2005 book of poetry/photography (available at www.soularenaissance.com).