Armed with a Camera

A CHOICE OF WEAPONS by Gordon Parks. 274 pages. Harper & Row. $4.95.

"If a white boy can do it, so can you," Gordon Parks's mother once told him. "So don't ever give me your color as a cause for failing."

Though he was often tempted to cop the color plea, Parks instead searched for ways to win and, extravagantly endowed with talent, he found them. He became a professional basketball player with a showboating Negro team called the House of David, a songwriter whose tunes were broadcast on the networks, the author of a favorably reviewed autobiographical novel (The Learning Tree-TIME, Sept. 6, 1963) and the composer of six musical works that have been performed from Venice to Manhattan. He also became a photographer and, as a LIFE staffer since 1949, Parks has become famous for his photographic work in both the dark world of the Negro slum and the gossamer land of high fashion.

In a lean, well-written memoir--some of which echoes material in The Learning Tree-Parks describes how often he came within an eyelash of choosing violence and raw, corrosive hatred as his weapons in the struggle for dignity. After a fight with three white toughs in St. Paul, Minn.-a battle that left him with a dozen scars from getting pitched through a plate-glass storefront-he reflected how the white man's brutality "was nudging me into a hatred of him." After his first walk through Harlem's streets, he was convinced that "Mister Ofay"-the white foe-"was the enemy now, the lord of this filthy ghetto." White people, he said, "were making it easy for me to hate white people." But always he looked instead for a better weapon than hatred.

Born Restless. Born in 1912, the youngest of 15 children of a taciturn Kansas farmer, Parks began his search at 16, when his mother died and his family scattered. He worked as a busboy and a waiter, a piano player in a Minneapolis whorehouse and a janitor in a Chicago flophouse, a runner for a Harlem dope pusher, a dining-car waiter and a lumberjack for the Civilian Conservation Corps. He was so poor that he often slept on trolley cars, and he regularly raided trash barrels for discarded newspapers so that he could check the classifieds for jobs.

"I was born restless," writes Parks, and he tried everything. In 1937, after seeing a collection of dust-bowl pictures by Carl Mydans, Walker Evans and Ben Shahn (who in those days was a photographer as well as a painter), Parks decided to try photography. He hustled to a downtown Seattle hock shop, bought a $12.50 Voigtlander camera, spent half an hour learning how to use the thing, then began shooting everything that crossed his path. So intent was he that he fell into Puget Sound while trying to photograph sea gulls.

Double Exposure. Parks nearly muffed his first big chance. Hired to photograph fashions for a Minneapolis department store, he double-exposed "every damn picture but one." That one so impressed the wife of the store's owner, however, that she began tossing other jobs his way. With the money he made from photographing wealthy white and Negro women, Parks bought film, exposed it to scenes of Chicago's sordid South Side Negro ghetto: a woebegone five-year-old girl burying her pet dog, a family of eight sleeping on one mattress, an old woman in her Sunday-go-to-church clothes, with the desolation of the ghetto reflected in her steel-rimmed glasses. The collection helped him to become the first photographer to win a Julius Rosenwald fellowship, established for struggling artists.

Parks ends his memoir in 1944. Later he would join LIFE and the front ranks of photojournalism. "Poverty and bigotry would still be around," he realized then, "but at least I could fight them on even terms. The significant thing was a choice of weapons with which to fight them effectively."

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