In the late Forties, while Parks was photographing fashion for Vogue, he had just started to shoot crime stories for LIFE. "It was difficult to go back to the street where I saw a boy murdered the night before," he admits, "and then have to, in my mind, juxtapose that image with the color of a dress [for a fashion shoot] that was the same color of the blood." A lot of violence Parks became observer to shook him up and shook up his way of thinking about American judicial procedures. He recounts being witness to a murderer's execution by gas at Sing-Sing prison. "It was extremely difficult for me to watch a man die, knowing that I had spoken to him the night before and he had asked me to attend his execution." Parks vividly recalls the way the prisoner was led in to the room, strapped to the chair with his wrists down, and jumped when the gas reached his heart. "It's something I never wanted to see again. ...Four days later I was back shooting fashions." While Parks seemed to find fashion photography appealing, and he was good at it, his real interest was always in photojournalism. At LIFE, where Parks was the first African-American photographer, he was shooting gang wars in Harlem while also covering the latest fashions in Paris. Soon, he grew transfixed on the story of the Harlem gangs, particularly the Midtowners, one of the toughest gangs in Manhattan. Parks managed to gain the trust of the gang's 16-year-old leader Red Jackson by offering to drive various gang members around in the photographer's Buick. Most of the gang photos Parks shot of the Midtowners took on such importance because of Parks's ability to capture incredible insight and depth into the everyday living and ways of survival for these gang members...something which had rarely, if ever, been portrayed in the American media at the time. "Red and his fellow gang members' perilous existence was a far cry from the perfumed houses of high fashion that I'd been assigned to a month after the Midtowners assignment," Parks says. "Such a double-faced reality posed the kind of readjustment that was hard to come by, especially after a Midtowner was badly knifed during a rumble." Forty years later Parks was walking through Penn Station when he heard a voice call out his name. "I looked up at this man standing before me and he asked 'You know me?' and I looked at him and said 'Red Jackson.'" Jackson, now 56, took Parks for a hot dog while he rehashed the violent days of his youth. "He asked me to go back to Harlem to help save some of the other young kids there who were inclined to become gang members, and I promised him I would." But after that meeting in Penn Station, Parks never heard from Red Jackson again."I have no idea whether he's dead or alive, but I would like to hear from him. You know, as a photographer, I developed relationships with my subjects, like with Red Jackson, that far outlasted the images I took of them. You don't just go in, shoot them and leave. . . ."