As a friend wrote earlier:
"The griots are moving to the other world."
She made this statement in reference to the recent death of Octavia Butler, and today's news that both Gordon Parks and Ali Farka Toure passed on on Tuesday.
The text about Parks was posted to nmazca.blog in December 2002. The story about Toure was written and posted on this site last June.
"...Struck by the faces of dust bowl refugees in these [FSA] pictures, and hounded by bigotry himself, [Gordon] Parks came to understand how to fight the poverty and racism of his past. He chose photography as his principal 'weapon' and spent $7.50 on a pawn-shop camera.* He then fell into the Puget Sound off Seattle making his first amateur photographs of seagulls..."
From the Tacoma Art Museum's brochure for Half Past Autumn, which I took in (on two big floors; well more than 100 prints) this afternoon...
* At the time, Parks was 25/26. He began to shoot for Life Magazine at 36. It was amazing to me that so much happened for him/he undertook so much after he turned 30... and that he didn't even have a camera until he was 25!
See The Films & Photography of Gordon Parks Sr. for just a slice about his productive career.
I first heard Ali Farka Toure play in 1998, by way of a CD that I dredged up from the cheapo bin at a video 'n' music store in Gallup, New Mexico. "Oh, some African music. That'll be nice" were my thoughts at the time. Little did I know...
As I played the disc, I was soon drawn in by the utter familiarity of the rhythms and lyrics -- despite the fact that the songs were sung in West African dialects.* This was music that I'd heard before, and which was brought up memories from deep within the transpersonal databanks.
The text about Parks was posted to nmazca.blog in December 2002. The story about Toure was written and posted on this site last June.
"...Struck by the faces of dust bowl refugees in these [FSA] pictures, and hounded by bigotry himself, [Gordon] Parks came to understand how to fight the poverty and racism of his past. He chose photography as his principal 'weapon' and spent $7.50 on a pawn-shop camera.* He then fell into the Puget Sound off Seattle making his first amateur photographs of seagulls..."
From the Tacoma Art Museum's brochure for Half Past Autumn, which I took in (on two big floors; well more than 100 prints) this afternoon...
* At the time, Parks was 25/26. He began to shoot for Life Magazine at 36. It was amazing to me that so much happened for him/he undertook so much after he turned 30... and that he didn't even have a camera until he was 25!
See The Films & Photography of Gordon Parks Sr. for just a slice about his productive career.
I first heard Ali Farka Toure play in 1998, by way of a CD that I dredged up from the cheapo bin at a video 'n' music store in Gallup, New Mexico. "Oh, some African music. That'll be nice" were my thoughts at the time. Little did I know...
As I played the disc, I was soon drawn in by the utter familiarity of the rhythms and lyrics -- despite the fact that the songs were sung in West African dialects.* This was music that I'd heard before, and which was brought up memories from deep within the transpersonal databanks.
As a friend wrote earlier:
"The griots are moving to the other world."
mr damon, 12:51
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