Photo District News remembers photographer and “renaissance man” (poet and screenwriter) Gordon Parks.
“I picked up a camera because it was my choice of weapons against what I hated most about the universe: racism, intolerance, poverty,” Parks said in a 2000 video with PDN (viewable here). “I could have just as easily picked up a knife or a gun, like many of my childhood friends did… but I chose not to go that way. I felt that I could somehow subdue these evils by doing something beautiful that people recognize me by, and thus make a whole different life for myself, which has proved to be so.”
See also PDN’s Legends Online: Gordon Parks. And Washington Post tribute.
Eight Diagrams 
Gordon Parks will certainly be missed!