In 1969 a struggling Hollywood studio handed a major feature film to a Black director who had never attended film school and had survived his teens playing piano in Midwest brothels. This episode explores the life of Gordon Parks, born in 1912 in segregated Fort Scott, Kansas, the youngest of 15 children, told by a teacher that college would be a waste of money, thrown into a river at 11 by boys who assumed he could not swim, and cast out onto the streets of St. Paul at 15 after his mother’s death.

We trace how he quietly studied the wealthy patrons of the Minnesota Club as a busboy, bought a $12.50 camera from a Seattle pawn shop in 1940, and rose with startling speed through fashion work, the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship, and the Farm Security Administration, where his portrait of cleaning woman Ella Watson before an American flag alarmed his boss Roy Stryker. The conversation covers his contradictory worlds of Vogue and a Harlem gang leader, his two decades as Life magazine’s first Black staff photographer, the 1956 Alabama essay on the Thornton, Causey, and Tanner families, The Learning Tree, the cultural earthquake of Shaft, and a creative output that included 15 books, a ballet for Martin Luther King Jr., and co-founding Essence.

• Code-switching as an artistic superpower: mastering a system’s language to rewrite it
• Why a lack of formal training freed him from the stiff conventions of 1930s photography
• American Gothic, Washington, D.C. and the fear it would get the FSA defunded
• Shooting models in motion on city streets instead of posing them like mannequins
• The Spingarn Medal, the National Medal of Arts, and the loss of his filmmaker son in 1979