Gordon Parks Worked for the F.S.A. Before He Gained Fame, Documenting Society's Divisions - NYTimes.com: Gordon Parks (1912-2006) is celebrated as a photographer, filmmaker, memoirist and breaker of color barriers. Before he was famous, however; before he was Gordon Parks, he had a one-year fellowship as a photographer at the Farm Security Administration. There, under the tutelage of Roy Stryker, he honed his skills.
And now we get to sample the result in a gem of a book, “Fields of Vision: The Photographs of Gordon Parks,” just published by the Library of Congress and the Giles publishing house. It presents 50 of Mr. Parks’s F.S.A. photos from the library’s holdings. The editor, Amy Pastan, has found many fine photographs that have rarely been seen.
It’s beautifully printed but, happily, it’s the antithesis of a coffee-table book, both in size (barely 7-by-7 inches) and in price.
It’s also just one of a series that the library is presenting of works commissioned from some of America’s greatest photographers from the F.S.A. and the Office of War Information.
