Today marks the hundredth birthday of the photographer, writer, musician, activist, and filmmaker Gordon Parks, who died of cancer in 2006.

The first job Parks had was as a pianist in a brothel. He went on to work as a photographer for the Farms Security Administration, along with Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Carl Mydans, among others, as well as for the Office of War Information. He freelanced for Vogue before joining the staff of Life magazine, in 1948. Parks’s film adaption of his semi-autobiographical novel “The Learning Tree” was the first Hollywood studio film directed by an African-American, and his film “Shaft” is widely credited with being the first blaxploitation film of the nineteen-seventies.

Here is a selection of Parks’s photos:





1 / 20 Chevron Chevron Fulton Fish Market, New York.

All photographs courtesy of the Library of Congress.