Portraits, 1947-63

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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).