These images and words are a gathering of individuals, events, places, conflicts and dilemmas that confronted me as I shifted from course to course in pursuit of survival. Some star-coloured, others, painted with rage, fall like rain in my memory. They all simmer down to what I remember, forgot, and what at last I know. Gordon Parks This five-volume collection surveys five decades of Gordon Parks photography. It is the most extensive publication to document his legendary career. Widely recognized as the most important and influential African-American photo grapher of the twentieth century, Parks combined a unique documentary and artistic style with a profound commitment to social justice. Working first for the Farm Security Administration and later for Life magazine, he specialized in extendednarrative picture stories on difficult subject matter. Covering crime, poverty, segregation, the politics of race and class, and controversial personalities, Parks became legendary for his ability to meld penetrating insight with a lyrical aesthetic. He was thus able to introduce a broad and diverse public to people, issues and ideas they might otherwise have ignored. Parks was remarkably versatile, travelling the world to photograph news events and fashion, as well as the worlds of art, literature, music, theatre and film. Later in life, he reconceived his vision in fundamentally personal and poetic terms, producing colour photographs that were allusive rather than descriptive, symbolic rather than literal. Gordon Parks was born into poverty and segregation in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912. An itinerant labourer, he worked as a brothel pianist and railcar porter, among other jobs, before buying a camera at a pawnshop, training himself, and becoming a photographer. In addition to his storied tenures at the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information (1941 1945) and Life magazine (1948 1972), Parks was a modern-day Renaissance man, who found success as a film director, author and composer. The first African-American director to helm a major motion picture, he popularised the Blaxploitation genre through his film Shaft (1971). He wrote numerous memoirs, novels and books of poetry, and received many awards, including the National Medal of Arts, and more than fifty honorary degrees. In 1997 the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., mounted his retrospective exhibition  Half Past Autumn: The Art of Gordon Parks . Parks died in 2006.