Gordon Parks was transcendent.

Just ask anyone who knew him. The legendary photographer, movie director, writer and composer didn’t just take pictures, write books and music and make movies. He used those media to take readers and viewers beyond the surface image to the places where his subjects dwelled.

As mourners gather at Riverside Church at 122nd Street and Broadway in Harlem this afternoon to funeralize Parks, they will also salute the man who overcame wrenching poverty, the loss of his mother at age 16, subsequent homelessness and persistent racism to become a celebrated, latter-day Renaissance man.

Parks, who had been in declining health since 1993, died last Tuesday at his home in New York. He was 93.

The list of Parks’ accomplishments could nearly fill a book. He was the first black photographer to work at Life and Vogue magazines, the first black man to work for the Office of War Information and the Farm Security Administration during the 1940s. In the 1960s, he was the first black director for a major studio. He wrote the screenplay, co-produced, directed and composed the musical score for the film based on his 1963 novel, “The Learning Tree.” He also directed "Shaft," "Shaft’s Big Score" and "The Super Cops," also filming several documentaries for television and the Public Broadcasting System.

Handsome, elegant and as gracious as he was graceful, many younger black photographers sought to emulate Parks’ style in their personal lives as well as in their work.

“We all tried to copy that elegance,” Dudley M. Brooks, assistant managing editor for news photography at The Baltimore Sun told BlackAmericaWeb.com.

“His work was so much from not just the black perspective, but from the cultural perspective that explained humanity. He figured out how to visually put that feeling on film. When I saw it, I thought, ‘That’s what the work should look like. That’s what it should feel like.'”

“Gordon Parks was much more than a photographer. He was divine light brought to earth like the rest of us, but who, in his own special way, made an imprint on our lives with his creative genius,” Magnum photojournalist and filmmaker Eli Reed told the National Press Photographers Association on Wednesday.

Reed teaches photojournalism at the University of Texas in Austin and is the author of “Black in America,” for which Parks wrote the forward.

“I really wanted him to write the introduction,” Reed told BlackAmericaWeb.com, “because he was the only one who would understand what I was trying to do.”

He said he appreciated Parks because he was willing to put himself on the line and make a statement with his work.

“He was a humanitarian in the best sense of the word,” Reed said. “Most people, photographers included, are treading water, not going where the sharks are because that’s a frightening thing. When you take a stand with your work, you are putting your butt out there.”

Parks’ photography was imbued with empathy and memories developed over a lifetime that had been, at turns, brutal and sublime.

Parks was born in 1912 in Fort Scott, Kansas, during racially turbulent times.

“Our parents had filled us with love and a staunch Methodist religion. We were poor, though I did not know it at the time,” Parks wrote in his autobiography, “A Choice of Weapons.” His family loved and protected him as best they could, “but there were segregated schools and warnings to avoid white neighborhoods after dark. I always had to sit in the peanut gallery (the Negro section) at the movies. We weren’t allowed to drink a soda in the drugstore in town. I was stoned and beaten and called ‘nigger,’ ‘black boy,’ ‘darky,’ ‘shine.’”

His mother died when Parks was 16, and he was sent to St. Paul, where he lived with a sister and brother-in-law. After an argument just before Christmas one year, his sister’s husband threw Parks out. Suddenly homeless, Parks dropped out of high school and took on a number of temporary jobs, including playing piano in a brothel.

Eventually, Parks ended up playing piano in a band that was on tour as it passed through St. Paul. The band broke up after returning to New York and Parks joined the Civilian Conservation Corps. He returned to St. Paul in 1934, taking a job as a railroad dining car waiter and porter.

It was during his railroad years that Parks developed an interest in photography. On a run to Seattle, he decided to buy a camera. At a downtown pawnshop, Parks bought a Voigtlander Brilliant. “I liked that name and when (the store owner) told me it was only $12.50, I hurriedly pulled the money from my pocket,” he wrote in “Choice of Weapons.”

He went to the wharfs and fell into Puget Sound headfirst while trying to take pictures of seagulls. When he returned to the Twin Cities, Parks took his film to Eastman Kodak to be developed. When he returned to pick up the prints one of the clerks complimented him and promised him an exhibit.

True to his word, six weeks later, Parks’ photos were on display in the window of Kodak’s downtown Minneapolis store.

Over time, Parks became known in St. Paul as a fashion photographer. Marva Louis, the wife of heavyweight boxing champ Joe Louis, encouraged Parks to move to Chicago where she could steer more fashion photography his way. The fashion work helped support his family while he documented life in the city’s slums. It was those photos that won him a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1941. The next year, he went to work in Washington, D.C. for the Farm Security Administration, which was created to produce a historical record of social and cultural conditions throughout the United States.

It was while working for the FSA that Parks shot “American Gothic,” a photo of Ella Watson, a charwoman who worked in the FSA building, posed with a mop and a broom in front of the American flag. It became one of his signature works.

Deborah Willis, a professor of history and imaging at New York University, is teaching a course about Parks this semester at Harvard entitled, “The Body and the Lens.”

The purpose, Willis told BlackAmericaWeb.com, is to “look at how he used the body, especially women’s bodies, to make a statement -- for example, Ella Watson and the way he was able to tell her story in the place of the mop and the broom.”

“The broom and the mop were iconic images of the American woman,” Willis told The Washington Post. “He was constructing a story about women who survived.”

Willis said Parks reached across generations to encourage young people to broaden their horizons.

After the FSA disbanded, Parks worked for the Office of War Information. By 1944, Parks was back in New York and his work began to appear in Vogue and Glamour after the publisher of Harper’s Bazaar refused to hire Parks because he was black. He also worked for Standard Oil of New Jersey until 1948, when he joined the staff of Life magazine, where he worked until 1972.

For Life, Parks traveled the globe, photographing glamorous models in idyllic settings. He also covered the less comforting side of life: segregation, crime and poverty. A photo of a poor Brazilian boy named Flavio de Silva in 1961 brought in donations to help the family build a house. In 1968, Parks documented, in pictures and in words, conditions in a Chicago slum. It turned into a 16-page package in the magazine.

“The Life magazine family lost one of its dearest members when the renowned photographer Gordon Parks died,” Bill Shapiro, managing editor of Life, said in a statement released Wednesday. “Gordon was one of the magazine’s most accomplished shooters and one of the very greatest American photographers of the 20th century. He moved as easily among the glamorous figures of Hollywood and Paris as he did the poor in Brazil and the powerful in Washington.”

“I believe Parks transposed his artistic dreams into reality and set out on a lifelong career of poignant storytelling,” said Sarah Glover, a photographer at the Philadelphia Inquirer and secretary for the National Association of Black Journalists, who met with Parks briefly during a photo shoot at a Syracuse University alumni reception in New York City six years ago. “To me, Gordon’s life story demonstrates how hope and creativity can produce resolution to life’s obstacles.”

Even from that brief interaction, Glover told BlackAmericaWeb.com, she realized “where you can go with our work if you have a vision and a drive.” Meeting Parks was so inspiring, she said, that after the reception, “I called my mom and said, ‘Okay, I can die now.’”

Sheena Lester, managing editor of BlackAmericaWeb.com, experienced the same high, she said, recalling how she called her father giddy with excitement after successfully convincing Parks to shoot a recreation of Art Kane's famous "Jazz Portrait" for XXL when she was its editor in chief in 1998. For the magazine's "Great Day in Hip-Hop" gatefold cover, over 200 rap music greats gathered under Parks' gaze on the same Harlem stoop where jazz legends were photographed 40 years prior.

"He was resolute in his refusal at first, but I simply told him that, even though we could get anyone to take that picture, for every reason in the world that really mattered, no one else should take it but him," Lester said. "He was silent, then he said, 'Alright, Miss Lester, I'll do it.' And I was so thrilled, I think I may have screamed into his ear on the phone."

Brooks said when he first became interested in photography around 18 or 19, “I really didn’t know what I was doing. I was kind of directionless,” until he saw a copy of Parks’ “Moments Without a Proper Name” and bought it. “As soon as I read it, I thought ‘That’s it!’ He was the guy who struck the chord. He provided the definition of what we could say with the work, what we could say with sensitivity and depth.”

Brooks said he had met Parks a few times and was one of 90 black photographers invited to celebrate Parks’ 90th birthday in 2002 in Harlem.

The event, at which photographers exchanged ideas and talked the business of photographic art, solidified what Brooks described as “an unofficial school of black photographers,” some of whom Brooks already knew, others only by reputation. “You get 90 Black folks who shoot in New York and Gordon is being Gordon ... it really started a fraternity.”

The party was “a chance for Black photographers collectively to say 'Thank you’ and ‘Amen,’” Jason Miccolo Johnson, who organized the celebration, told BlackAmericaWeb.com.

Johnson met Parks in 1980 at a book signing for another autobiography, “To Smile in Autumn,” at Howard University. By 1990, Johnson had persuaded Parks to pen the forward for “Songs of My People,” a photo documentary of the lives of African-Americans by 50 photographers published in 1992.

In a lyrical introduction to the book, Parks addressed the importance of photography to African American life:

“There was the responsibility to point up the plight of others less fortunate than myself; to communicate the abuse of the underprivileged as well as the insensitivity of those who administer the abuse. Silent watching was not enough. Even verbal condemnation had to give way to commitment.

“Photography was the most accessible way to put commitment into practice.”

“When we were putting Songs together, there was nobody else we were getting to do the forward,” said Brooks, who co-edited the book with photographers Eric Easter and D. Michael Cheers. “It wasn’t about getting his name on the project. There was nobody else who could launch us and accurately describe what we were trying to do.”

Ironically, Johnson said, Parks never talked about his work whenever the two were together. “He talked about his life and times and people he met and the fun he had, the great memories that were produced whether he was on vacation, at a restaurant and the work it produced.”

Parks tended not to view his life and his work as separate, Johnson said. “He never thought that the work was so special that only he could have created it. He had a curiosity. He wasn’t afraid to try new things. He wasn’t afraid to reinvent himself. He was not afraid of new possibilities.”

While some older photographers may have been loathe to move into the digital age, Johnson said, Parks never saw technology as an obstacle and once told him, “'Hey, whatever I can do to create art, I’ll use it. It’s just more or less a tool.'”

Parks was a firm believer in pursuing several avenues at once and encouraged others to do so, too.

“He had a way of encouraging me to do my own photography,” Willis said.

“I was working as a curator, and I had stopped working on my own photography. He continued with his photography, with his music, with film,” she said. “He encouraged me to continue doing it. He told me, 'Don’t stay with just one area.' He was just saying it was okay to do both, and I was trying to do one thing at a time.”

The recipient of numerous accolades, Parks donated 227 pieces of his work to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1998. Parks and the gallery produced a traveling exhibition, “Half Past Autumn,” and a coffee table book of the same name.

Willis was the co-curator with Philip Bookman, senior editor of photography at the Corcoran Gallery, of the “Half Past Autumn” exhibition.

She said Parks was “humorous. Patient, in terms of allowing us to decide what images we wanted to use, in terms of knowing we had to choose the images and he let us think we had control of what images to use and he let us think we were choosing the images he wanted to use.”

Asked what Parks’ legacy was to those who didn’t get to know him personally, Willis said, “The legacy is just to be able to dream and encourage. And, basically, living a life without borders.”