Andrea Morales has been making photographs since she was a child, and yes, “making photographs” is the right phrase here. Not taking photographs, capturing, or shooting. For Morales, these words are too aggressive to describe a process that is about building trust and intimacy between the photographer and the photographed individuals, or, as Morales calls them, her collaborators.
She’s been working in Memphis as a photojournalist for a decade now, making photographs of the community. You probably recognize her name from her work as the visuals director at MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, but she’s also been featured in The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, and TIME Magazine, among many others. Now, to add to her impressive resume, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art has opened an exhibit of 65 of her photographs of Memphis and the surrounding region, titled “Roll Down Like Water.”
Taking its name from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final speech in Memphis, in which he said, “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream,” the exhibit, says its curator Rosamund Garrett, is “a portrait of America through Memphis.”
“There are some tremendously famous photographers from this area,” Garrett says, “but I really feel that Andrea looks at things through a very fresh lens, and she looks at this region very directly, very earnestly, in a way that still allows the magic of this place to come through.”
Morales engages in what’s called movement journalism, an approach to journalism that emphasizes community over objectivity. This, in turn, makes the Brooks the first museum to showcase movement journalism, and the first to publish a catalogue on it.
It’s also the first time Morales will have her photography in a major museum exhibition. Of course, she’s used to her photographs being seen publicly on a large scale, with them being in publications and such, but this, she says, is different. She even shrugs when asked if she sees her work as art. “What’s art?” she ponders. “It’s hard to answer that.”
But in this exhibit, not in a publication with someone else’s byline, a headline she didn’t she choose, or quotes she didn’t pull, the photos can stand alone. “It does feel like something’s being restored, I guess,” Morales says. “I’m struggling with identifying exactly what, but it feels like something’s restored. It’s like back to that feeling of the moment [of making the photo] because you have that moment and then you kind of have to tuck it away because this photo has to exist in this one context [of an article]. But this is all existing in the context of me and Memphis right now. That’s been crazy. It feels very special to be honored this way, to be able to hold this much space.”
“Roll Down Like Water,” Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, 1934 Poplar Avenue, on display through January 2025.