Our childhood experiences shape the worldview we hold and for pioneering African-American photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks, having faced aggressive discrimination as a child in a  segregated elementary school and barred from participating in his high school activities, because of his race, he dedicated himself to documenting black feats and exposed oppressive acts.

Although he lost his mother early on at 14, and his father a vegetable farmer, Parks put in work and became a celebrated photographer, writer, composer and filmmaker, as well as, a poet, musician, storyteller and activist.

Parks will leave Chicago for Harlem and his 1948 photographic essay on a Harlem gang leader won him a position as a staff photographer for LIFE magazine, the nation’s highest-circulation photographic publication.

Although as a photographer his work spanned six decades, Parks’ work during 1940 to 1950 is most hailed by the black community as it defined his point of view as an African-American artist and documenter of American life at the dawn of the modern civil rights movement.

In his first decade, Parks captured the beauty, power, and stature of Chicago socialite Marva Louis; the spirituality of churchgoers in Washington, DC; as well as exposed injustices faced by black Americans, including poverty, violence, and oppression that defined the decade from 1940 to 1950.