Out of Focus

...Self concern at such a time was petty, 1 told myself...

...he also upends most of the superficial nonsense about the crippling effects of poverty one encounters in print everywhere these days-some of which, unhappily, makes its way into his own writing...

...One wishes that Parks had worked closer to the theme suggested by the highly evocative title and had made more of the implications of the storybook hero forging his sword...

...Negroes includes all of the negative things that go with racism and segregation...

...It was called "The Works of Gordon Parks: Images, Words, Music...

...He can get along very well in the slums or in the most elegant drawing rooms, in a street fight or at an occasion of state...

...Negro background...

...Negro prize fighter...

...Though a bit ofay if one thought of Count Basie, it sounded thoroughly professional...

...Nothing for example could be more obvious than the fact that anybody who has a life which merits an autobiography has had to overcome one sort of obstacle or another...

...Negro and because everybody is for encouraging the Negro this year...

...And, as if all that were not enough, he is also solidly grounded in the kind of practiced efficiency that only the self-made man has there to fall back on...

...Negro experience...

...Parks has been a member of the photographic staff of Life for some 16 years...

...Negro experience, in this book at any rate, tends to be more abstract than real...

...And furthermore, if becoming a member of the photographic in-crowd of Life represents a very special breakthrough for Negro Gordon Parks it is no less a breakthrough for every other incrowd member and not one bit less special...

...He tools on land, by sea and in the air, as they used to say during World War II...

...Of course his operations are conditioned by the experience of his U.S...

...At any rate he tries very hard to show some of its relevance to his development...

...This might even have given all the insistent political overtones a much deeper resonance...

...And one suspects that many will be doing so because Gordon Parks is a successful U.S...

...His piano concerto, which had a première with some fanfare in Venice in 1952, was used as the background sound track for the show...

...It is also, given the action it encompasses, a very interesting book from time to time...

...the title came afterwards...

...But perhaps in the actual process of recording the events involved he found the duelling metaphor too restrictive, or perhaps, as often happens...

...Nevertheless, many people who are otherwise extremely careful about the books they praise will not only make a fuss over this one but will be prepared to give all kinds of essentially sentimental excuses for its obvious shortcomings...

...Negro...

...and outside facing Sixth Avenue at 50th Street there was a dramatic newsprint shot which shows him to be a strikingly handsome and dashingly romantic U.S...

...Nor has it screened them against the educational fall-out from mass-media...

...One heard nothing which reflected the composer's early years as a honky tonk piano player, however...

...Meanwhile his current book is A Choice of Weapons...

...But unfortunately he does not succeed very well...

...He just simply will not let enough of the encounters stand on their own, without commentary...

...He becomes confused and misleading not only about the nature of his own life and the lives of other U.S...

...The book at the very outset does not "sound" at all like Gordon Parks talks, walks, looks and certainly not the way he operates...

...There are people whose confusion about all this even leads them to write as if no one can enjoy a spring rainscape unless he also has the right to vote...

...son-of-a-gun if there ever was one, is trying to pass himself off as the Son of Social Science Fiction, Flash (bulb) Gordon, the upward mobile kid from the (segregated) twilight zone of inner space...

...The last thing in the world that they still want to hear, of course, is that all during the time of this self-therapeutic commiseration, Joe Louis himself was living well in several very sumptuous homes, staying in the finest hotels, playing on the most exclusive golf courses with very compatible companions, enjoying the company of stylish and admiring women, eating the finest of food and attending the top entertainment-and picking up the tab for it...

...No Edmund Wilson, he...

...One assumes of course, that Gordon Parks is aware of all this...

...These "friendly" ones, the benevolent white supremacists, are forever forgiving Negroes for something...

...But he has been unable to get them into sharp enough focus in A Choice of Weapons...

...And in this he is not unlike the U.S...

...Most of the time the author of A Choice of Weapons is too busy turning rhetorical somersaults to show that he is operating out of a background of U.S...

...schools have been trying to turn out for all these years...

...One has only to remember all the unsegregated white boys squinting into view finders all over the country and dreaming of taking pictures for Life...

...And finally, not the least remarkable thing about Parks is the fact that for all his already recognized accomplishments he is in his early 50s even more promising than he was at 19...

...it includes accounts of his early marriage and family life and reveals how he came to be a photographer...

...But A Choice of Weapons seems deliberately designed to read like the story of a very lucky little black boy who somehow or other did not become a social problem but rather has made an astonishing breakthrough into the great wide wonderful white world of milk and money-has made it but not quite, or something like that...

...Negroes who actually accept such totally irrelevant forgiveness-and then go around fuming about all of the crocodillia they have to put up with from white folks...

...During this time his photographic essays have taken him around the globe...

...If not completely at home, Gordon Parks certainly functions easily enough in almost any situation almost anywhere in the world...

...As a matter of fact many are all too eager to forgive all sorts of sins which Negroes were never guilty of in the first place...

...It ends with him returning to Harlem after having been promised and then denied an overseas assignment as a combat cameraman with the all Negro 332nd Fighter Group during World War II...

...The trouble is that his conception of U.S...

...but it also includes the challenging circumstances which can make for ambition, integrity and transcendent achievement...

...Everybody knows that there can be no heroes without walls and dragons...

...He is also, any way you look at it, a very remarkable man...

...Inside, in addition to the arresting excellence of the photography itself, one was immediately impressed by the extraordinary range of interest which the subject matter revealed...

...There were studies capturing the mobility of Alexander Calder's sculpture, portraits of women of wealth and fashion, compositions blending old paintings with still-life objects, and abstract color etudes comparable to good contemporary painting...

...Among the fine black and white enlargements, which included selections from a documentary study-in-depth of a South American family and a wide variety of shots taken on news assignments, was one smoggy and sooty Harlem rooftop panorama which might have been the work of a Manhattan Piranesi...

...No photographers anywhere get more choice assignments, are better paid, have their product more expertly showcased, taken more seriously or distributed more widely...

...Segregation for all its brutal restrictions never has blocked U.S...

...But people who substitute psychological or psychiatric theory for experience go right on pretending and perhaps even believing that nobody ever actually survives any adventure or ever reaches the enchanted castle...

...Today he is a contributing photographer, which is about as "in" as one can get in that profession...

...The facts in his narrative make this clear enough...

...This is why he got where he is today, as the Southern Negro High School principals say...

...In addition to the photography there was music...

...When one says that there was little in his early environment to indicate that young Gordon Parks would someday grow up to become such a magnificent photographer, one should also remember that there could hardly have been more in the childhood environment of Matthew Brady either...

...Gordon Parks is aware of all this also, and there is every reason to assume that he is aware of a good many other things as well...

...Given the author's subsequent success in his line of work, A Choice of Weapons is a newsworthy book...

...A number of his articles have appeared in Life and in 1963 he wrote The Learning Tree, a novel about early adolescence in the Midwest which is currently being made into movie...

...or even a succulent prime steak unless he has a seat on the New York Stock Exchange-even though he has more than the price of the bill of fare...

...his travels to Chicago, the Far West, New York City...

...Negroes but also about human motives...

...But white supremacists will be white supremacists, it seems, some without ever actually becoming aware of it...

...Nobody ever heard of a Negro fighter excusing himself for a poor showing in the ring because he comes from a low-income family and never got enough to eat...

...Reviewed by ALBERT MURRAY Contributor, "Life" and other periodicals Gordon Parks, as is well known and seldom disputed, least of all by his peers, is one of the finest photographers in the world...

...A Choice of Weapons is a nonfiction memoir, which begins in a sense where The Learning Tree ends...

...and ironically, like most U.S...

...Negroes never have been culturally deprived in any fundamental sense of the word...

...And there are, to be sure, those U.S...

...Yet on balance it is not really very convincing, Not because one questions the accuracy of the facts, but because unfortunately, they are often so artificially structured that they do not ring true enough...

...One is reminded of the way the white supremacists got even with Joe Louis for being the greatest heavyweight champion since Jack Johnson, the greatest of them all: They went into nationwide mourning for his federal income-tax difficulties...

...There were photographs of landscapes, skyscapes, seascapes, animal life, and sporting events...

...During the past several years Parks has become a part-time writer...

...Thus this book, like The Learning Tree, cannot be ranked beside his best photography...

...On the whole, though, one was left with the impression that the author was more interested in turning out a fictionalized memoir to interpret the "meaning" of certain experiences of his own childhood than in telling a story about Newt Winger, the young hero, and his friends and competitors, who have such nostalgic names as Beansy, Jappy, Earl, Marcus and Skunk...

...The story opens in Kansas with the death of Parks' mother when he was 16 and covers his coming of age in Minnesota in the 1930s, his struggle to put himself through high school, and his experiences as busboy, dining car waiter, basketball player, piano player, song writer, and ccc worker...

...Gordon Parks is unlikely to accept anybody else's excuses for anything he has ever flubbed...

...The background experience of U.S...

...In spite of all the substandard test scores, U.S...

...He is hip in a crap game, cool at the swankiest race tracks, gone in the world of high fashion, with it in the world of the intellectuals, a pro in Hollywood, cagey in the political capitals, smooth on the dance floor and canny in combat zones...

...It relates his adventures in and around pool rooms, bars, whorehouses, and flop houses...

...As a matter of fact Gordon Parks not only updates most of the old Horatio Alger success stories...

...Negroes off from the essential influences of the public school system...

...But his insistent interpretations are often so stilted and self-conscious that they project, more often than not, a false naïveté on the one hand and a totally uncharacteristic pretentiousness on the other...

...Parks is a man who has always been on easier terms with the everyday world than most other people...

...Moreover, his work has appeared in the leading fashion magazines, in most of the major exhibitions of photography as a fine art, and most recently in an outstanding one-man show in the gallery on the ground floor of the Time-Life building...

...Nor will anyone with a reliable sense of human potential fail to realize that an obviously well heeled and cultivated U.S...

...His sentiments upon hearing the news of Pearl Harbor, for instance, would put Douglas MacArthur to shame...

...He is in fact the kind of well-rounded 20th century human being the best U.S...

...And one reason a fighter knows better than to try to pull this kind of old thin stuff is that there are too many other hungry Negro fighters (many of them fatherless) winning championships...

...He is well adjusted as they say, exceptional in his chosen profession, above average in a number of others, and has high potential in still others...

...Some of the sequences and some of the details in The Learning Tree were expertly rendered...

...Sometimes it seems as if he himself doesn't quite know what to make of what he has in fact already made of himself...

...Man, how you Sound...

...Negro sitting in a Paris cafe speaking charming French to a Countess may well have a father who picked cotton in Alabama and averted his eyes (or pretended to) everytime a barefooted redneck girl spoke to him...

...And anyway, one truly interested in the perpetually fascinating mystery of human nature should not ignore the fact that many of the non-Negroes who infest Greenwich Village, the Bowery, and the narcotics dens of the upper West Side come from backgrounds of freedom and even wealth and power...

...Negro writers these days, he seems most convinced that he is laying on the heroic complications when he is only piling up the academic oversimplification...

...Sometimes, in fact, A Choice of Weapons reads for all the world as if Gordon Parks, a classic U.S...

...a passionate night of love unless he has executive status...

...The sentimental excuse-makers always seem to overlook the most obvious facts of every day life...

...In any case, Park's best weapon is a camera and someone as gifted as he is it works miracles of insight and, delight...

...One has only to remember how well he handled himself and maintained his personal integrity and his ambitions throughout all the difficulties of his first days in Minnesota, to say nothing of the days which followed...

...Instead of Kansas City for getting with it, what one heard was Honnegger for the Darkroom...

...He has not done himself justice in A Choice of Weapons...

...There were also words, galley proofs and copies of his books...

...Thus when one refers to Gordon Parks as having had an unpromising beginning and reports that his life has been beset with obstructions, one is really only indicating that Parks has the makings of a good story...