by Daniel Johnson
May 19, 2025
The 75,000 images chronicle ordinary Black life, capturing decades of Black weddings, graduations, and more.
In Memphis, an archive of 75,000 photographs offers an intimate look at Black life in the city over four decades—featuring not only glimpses of icons like B.B. King, Mahalia Jackson, and W.C. Handy, but more importantly, everyday moments like weddings and graduations.
Andrea and Rodney Herenton, who purchased the collection of photos by Hooks Brothers Studios, donated it to the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art and the National Civil Rights Museum.
“It’s a priceless inheritance,” Andrea Herenton told the New York Timesadding that the collection would help “inspire and live and breathe and teach and connect the past to the present,” by entering the public.
The collection may also help untether Memphis to its connection to outsiders as the city where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated.
“People still found their way through tribulation. That is the strength of this community, despite the poverty, despite the historical challenges,” Russell Wigginton, president of the National Civil Rights Museum, located at the site of King’s assassination, the Lorraine Motel, told the Times. “There’s no party like a Memphis party. There’s nothing like when people are in community here, trust me.”
Community is the common theme of the photographs captured by the studio opened by Henry A. Hooks Sr. and Robert B. Hooks on Memphis’ famed Beale Street in 1907. At the time, the location was a hub for Black residents in a city that was still in the grips of Jim Crow segregation.
“It’s just so unique in terms of being such a long-term visual documentation of one community, one city. It documents you,” Ernestine Jenkins, a professor of art history at the University of Memphis, said after she produced a photo of her mother’s class photograph from 1937, which was taken by the Hooks brothers.
Jenkins continued, “It documents your family. It documents your community. It documents your region. It documents Memphis.”
According to C. Rose Smith, an assistant curator at the Brooks Museum, said the photos highlight “thinking about the beautification of a Black subject, and how the Hooks brothers may have even manipulated lighting to make sure they’re able to render Black skin tones correctly.”
Smith said the immediate goal, to have a collection of images ready for the exhibition’s anticipated 2026 debut.
To that end, Smith has been working with the Memphis community to identify people in the photos and the stories behind the photographs, visiting several senior citizens and alumni gatherings, finding some who had been photographed by the brothers.
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