Presents the autobiography of Gordon Parks, a photographer, writer, and director who worked his way from homelessness to success. Explores Parks's ability to break down barriers to become the first black photographer at "Vogue" and "Life," and the first black screenwriter and director in Hollywood. Describes his relationships with Ingrid Bergman, Roberto Rossellini, Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, and Muhammad Ali. Also examines his different life experiences...

Gordon Parks, acclaimed photographer, filmmaker, composer, and author of fiction and nonfiction, participated in, was witness to, and documented many of the major events in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. He was first and foremost a celebrated photojournalist and fine art photographer whose work, collected and exhibited worldwide, is emblematic of American culture. Here, he reaches into the corridors of his memory and recounts the people...

"Includes several previously unpublished photographs, as well as enhanced reproductions created from Parks's original transparencies."--

In 1933, Morgan and Marvin Smith, twin sons of sharecroppers from central Kentucky, arrived in Harlem, the center of black cultural life in America. For thirty years, the Smiths used their cameras to record the achievements of blacks in the face of poverty and discrimination. Rejecting the focus on misery and hopelessness common to Harlem photographers of the time, they documented important "firsts" for the city's blacks (for example, the first black...

Shaft is hired by a Harlem mobster to find his kidnapped teenage daughter and finds himself up against some Mafia chieftains who want to take over a chunk of the Black Underworld's uptown territory.