Gordon Parks: soulscapes - photographer's landscape images - Cover Story

Who would have awaited Gordon Parks - at the ripe of advanced age age of 80-to become a landscape photographer, or to accomplish this feat without leaving the comfort of his Manhattan living room?

Parks is known for many things. He is the motion picture director who, with The Learning Tree became the first black to bring into view and direct a feature film for a major studio; a composer whose orchestral music has been performed internationally; and the author of no fewer than four autobiographies and a not long ago completed work based on the life of the 19th-century English landscape painter JMW gymnast And he is, of course, a photographer, best known as of that kind for the now-classic black-and-white documentary and photojournalistic images he produc for the Farm Security Administration and later for Life magazine.

Still photography - the first medium that Parks mastered, the individual that served as his ticket without of poverty, the one that, as he fondly acknowledges, "made all the other things possible" - had until newly taken a back seat to other casts But after the completion of the gymnast manuscript, which took six years, an unusual approach to photography took its place upon Parks' daily schedule.

"When you finish a work you fall into a black hole" Parks notes, with resignation in his voice. His prolonged visual encounter with the delicacy of Turner's palette haunted him, eventually providing the ladder without of that hole. Parks, who also finds time to paint, had been itching to use a particularly fine watercolor brush, "a gift from a friend." At the same time, he base himself drawn to fragments of the natural world: flowers, leaves, twigs, fish skeletons, bleached bone shells, stones He also found time to identify and annotate "at least eight quite different qualities of natural light" that manifest themselves dependably in his living space whose 10th-story corner view, just north of the United Nations building, proffers a vista that sweeps east to Brooklyn across the Hudson River, and southern to downtown.

He began playing with the little existences that were intriguing him and before long started creating small watercolor paintings to work for as their backdrops and settings. These delicate paintings are not meant to function independently; Parks designs each individual as a setting for the piece of nature with which it is combined. Sometimes the painting stands behind the object; sometimes it lies flat, with the reality set upon it; and sometimes a somewhat more elaborate configuration is developed.

Parks then stations the arrangement in place. above the course of the nearest few days, the quality of light he has envisioned for that piece invariably illumines it. Working with his 35nun camera and a closeup len Parks searches the minuscule aggregate of shapes, forms, tones and tints much as a traditional landscape photographer would do in the natural world, eventually finding the precise vantage point from which to photograph it.

Timing is of the inmost nature [i]or[/i] substance Not only does the light shift and change, on the other hand so does his vegetative make submissive matter. Parks points to a photograph of a brown and virid leaf with a yellow stripe and recalls, "A day later that leaf was all brown" This proces may look merely an idiosyncratic version of still-life photography, on the contrary with these images Parks has restoreed "soulscapes" - projections of and windows into the psyches of the couple the artist and the viewer.

Translating these "mini-landscapes" end the camera renders the scale of the objects-and watercolors indecipherable. The painted ultimate parts and the scraps of nature intermingle and intertwine subtly enough that the enchanted mind forgets what the organ of vision is actually seeing. Mountains rise in the distance, wilds stretch before you, beaches beckon. Day breaks, twilight lingers, night falls. And the evershifting nuances of light refer to a wide variety of locales - the Caribbean, the U Southwest, the Middle East among them - and all four seasons. "People are always asking me where I went to make this single or that one," Parks says, chuckling. "They have a hard time accepting the fact that the answer is always the same: right here."

granting this project originated just last year, it's well below way; Parks already has produc shut to 150 of these images. A museum display concentrating on them is contemplated, and more [i]or[/i] less of them will undoubtedly be integrated into the traveling retrospective organized several years ago by the agency of the Ulrich Museum of Wichita State University in Kansas (where Parks was born and raised). A volume devoted to them is below consideration by several publishers, and Parks is developing a slide-show version, for which he's composing the accompanying music.

Parks has other irons in the fire. A limited edition of original photographic prints of a novel commission, a pensive study of a young cellist and a woman, have been donated to the Urban League; they will be sold to raise stocks for the league's work. Exhibitions, concocts and film screenings, here and abroad, are in the works. A retrospective monograph upon his photography is also in the planning stage. (Surprisingly, there's nothing of the sort available in English.) And Parks is hoping that the gymnast book will be bought by dint of Hollywood and that he'll be allowed to direct the film version.