While Parks moved easily among photographic genres, he created portraits with special acuity and warmth. Uncommonly sympathetic, he appreciated the character of his sitters differently, in ways uniquely attuned to their individual personalities and tastes. Whether it was his close friend Gloria Vanderbilt pausing in a perfectly disarming stare back at the camera, Alberto Giacometti among his attenuated sculpted fi gures in his Parisian studio, or Leonard Bernstein smoking with a musical score under his arm in Carnegie Hall, Parks tapped into the creative energies of his sitters, while leaving his own imprint on each portrait. “I have come to view portraits as images that invariably leave a lot of questions unanswered,” he reflected, suggesting that the “inexhaustible presence” he admired in good portraits relied as much on what remained hidden as it did on what was revealed (Half Past Autumn, 1997).
Ralph Ellison, New York, New York, 1947
Countess Jean Yves de la Cour, France, 1951
Peter Mennin, New York, New York, 1956
Alexander Calder in His Workshop, Roxbury, Connecticut, 1952
Novelist Carlo Levi Paints a Vivid Expressionist Nude, Rome, Italy, 1949
Leonard Bernstein, New York, New York, 1956
Diary of Anne Frank on Broadway, New York, New York, 1952
Untitled, White Plains, New York, 1956
Fashion Designers on 20th Century-Fox Back Lot, Century City, California, 1959
Alberto Giacometti and His Sculptures, Paris, France, 1951
