photograph by andrea morales
Visitors to the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel are reflected in the glass that encases Room 306, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was staying during his fatal visit to Memphis in 1968. They are gazing past the balcony where he was standing when he was shot, and toward the site from which the bullet was reportedly fired.
Andrea Morales was stuck behind a slow-moving pickup truck hauling sweet potatoes through Coahoma County, Mississippi. Sweet potatoes naturally tending to roll, a man rode along with them, doing his best to prevent any from tumbling out of the truck bed. Morales was new to the South (this was 2014) and still processing the region’s cultural syntax, its tempo. She had driven down to photograph an assignment for The Commercial Appeal and was impatient to be on her way home — but for the sweet potatoes, but for their minder.
Something stopped her short, and not only because her car could do little more than crawl along the blacktop, dodging the occasional careening sweet potato.
Andrea Morales photographed the cover of our March 2021 issue. A mother holds the hands of her two daughters while at a labor strike action organized by Fight for $15 outside the McDonald’s on Union Avenue in Midtown, July 2020.
Something about this unknown man, devoting all his energy, all his attention, to the simple, earnest chore of keeping the sweet potatoes on the truck — it nearly made her cry. “I looked at the guy, and looked at the moment, and I was like, how did I get here, stuck behind the sweet potato truck?” she found herself asking. “Every stupid thing has yielded something really special and miraculous. I don’t buy into linear progression,” she says, “but I do buy into cumulative progression.” The sweet potatoes, the man steadying them, the slowness, the Southernness — all accreting as part of Morales’ story.
She was born in Lima, Peru, but it was in Lima, Ohio, a small town 3,670 miles north, that Andrea Morales — a storyteller whose camera is her medium — learned to build community. Morales, who grew up in Miami, dreamed of one day becoming an “adventuring correspondent,” as she puts it, in Latin America. Instead, a few years out of college, she found herself working at a series of small-town newspapers in rural, white America — including a stint in, yes, Lima, Ohio. (The Midwestern version of Lima is pronounced like the bean.) Somewhat to her surprise, Morales loved “the small-town-ness of it,” finding that “there’s a whole level of adulting that happens when you’re accountable to a community.”
photograph by Brad Vest
Andrea Morales
Morales has thought deeply about what it means, especially as a journalist, to make herself accountable to a community. Memphians may recognize her name through her ongoing work with MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, a nonprofit digital news outlet based in Memphis, where she has been visuals director and primary photographer since veteran journalist Wendi Thomas launched the project on April 4, 2017.
April 4, 2018, marked a half-century since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Downtown Memphis; Thomas planned for MLK50 to be a yearlong project, but the newsroom has proved durable and continues to publish groundbreaking work. She says of Morales, “I can think of no modern-day photographer who has captured movement making in Memphis better than Andrea. If you looked up ‘bearing witness’ in the dictionary, you’d see her face. Just about every demonstration, action, or protest in Memphis in the last five years, she’s been there with her camera.”
photograph by andrea morales
Elvis fans gather outside of Graceland to celebrate the 38th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death in 2015.
Morales has shot for this magazine (including cover stories in October and December 2020) and for an impressive range of national publications, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. She’s completing an MFA in documentary expression at the University of Mississippi, working full-time at the university, continuing to freelance, all while maintaining a part-time relationship with MLK50.
I’ve been aware of her as a photographer for a few years — both seeing her credit line and catching sight of her in motion, camera in hand, in the Memphis community. More recently, we corresponded about those two Memphis magazine cover shoots. But it was in preparation for this article that we first sat down and talked at length. Our central conversation took place over Zoom one bright February morning, still early enough that our discussion tended to drift, cloudlike, from memory to theory, from social justice to pets, hither and thither. Not linear, but cumulative.
You don’t need to talk to Morales for long to know a couple of things for certain. One, she’s passionate about her work — not simply the making of photographs, but the moments of communion with her subjects, and the stories her work helps share. Two, she’s incandescently smart. Her talent for creating textured, evocative photographs is formidable, sure. But her work as a whole is guided by her continued interrogations of political systems, history, transcendence, joy, and justice.
photograph by andrea morales
Cherita Jackson Kirkland embraces her son, Luke Jackson, then 7, as a bell outside of the Lorraine Motel rings at 6:01 p.m. on April 4, 2018, the 50th annual commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.
In the 1980s, Peru roiled with political, social, and economic turbulence. A series of coups had, in part, defined the 1960s and ’70s; by the ’80s, guerrilla fighting was prevalent. The specifics get complex in a hurry. Morales remembers from her early childhood — she was born in 1984 — that people were setting off bombs in Lima. She cites the night her younger sister, Gabriela, was born as her most vivid early memory: A nightly curfew was in place to forestall violence, and her mother went into labor in the middle of the night. Getting her mother to the hospital was “a whole thing.”
Her parents, César and Rosa, wanted what parents tend to want for their children: safety, opportunity, stability. Determined to move to the United States, they entered a visa lottery system in hopes of receiving tourist visas. That lottery system, Morales notes, involves “so much luck.” She was 5 years old at the time, with a child’s memories — but “in my head,” she says, “those first years in Miami were all kind of special and sparkly.” But not without their hardships, she acknowledges. In many ways, life was harder in Miami than it had been in Lima. In Lima, her parents had owned a house (they won it through a contest — there’s the luck again). In Miami, the family piled into a family friend’s pool house, and next into a one-room apartment. When Hurricane Andrew hit, the youngest of the three girls was a week-old infant in a crib shoved next to the TV. It was time for an upgrade.
photograph by andrea morales
Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, American Heritage Girls, and community members gathered to salute and tend to 44,000 graves at Memphis National Cemetery in May 2015 as part of a Memorial Day celebration.
Tourist visas are temporary by design, and the Morales family did what plenty of people hoping to immigrate do: They overstayed their visa. For their first few years in Miami, they were undocumented, and so César and Rosa labored at what Morales describes as “the humble work that you can get without papers.” Together, the two cleaned shrimp on the docks for a time. César later worked as a janitor; Rosa found nannying and domestic work. By the time Morales was in middle school, her parents had obtained green cards and were able to find more stable jobs. For many years, Rosa has worked for American Airlines — enabling the family to get plane tickets back to Peru, and thereby to maintain a relationship with their family “in a way that I think a lot of immigrants don’t have,” her daughter notes.
Many years later, Morales traveled on assignment to the U.S.–Mexican border, near Brownsville, Texas. This was in 2018, after the panic early in Donald Trump’s presidency about caravans of migrants, and just before a tent city emerged across the Rio Grande from Brownsville. Hopeful immigrants from Central and South America were left, Morales recalls, to wait indefinitely on the bridges that span the Rio Grande. She arrived “all keyed up to tell a story. I was like, oh, Yo so immigrante tambien, I’m an immigrant also.” Seeing the conditions these immigrants were facing, though, she quickly realized, once on the ground, that “what immigrants coming to this country right now are facing is so different from what we had to deal with. The fact that we moved when we did — it’s just pure luck.”
photograph by andrea morales
On August 15, 2016, as hundreds gathered outside Graceland for the 39th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death, community members in support of Black Lives Matter and the Coalition of Concerned Citizens planned a direction action calling for police reform and economic justice. They were stopped by Memphis Police and fenced off in the rain a block away on Elvis Presley Boulevard.
The bits of English 5-year-old Andrea knew in 1989, when her family immigrated, she had absorbed from the global tentacles of American pop culture. But she learned the language quickly once in Miami, where she attended a bilingual elementary school. Coral Way Elementary School (now Coral Way Bilingual K-8 Center) was an early pioneer in two-way language immersion when it was founded in 1963 following an influx of Cuban immigrants.
Little Havana, the neighborhood of Miami where the family lived, was a little rough around the edges then, not yet the “gentrified hellscape” she says it’s become in more recent years. Morales is the eldest of three sisters (she spent a lot of time babysitting), and her parents “weren’t super interested in having us roam around the streets.” The girls — “real indoorsy kids” — grew robust imaginations, consumed their share of television, and did a lot of reading: all teleportation devices away from a cramped apartment on rainy Miami days.
The family camera served as another transportation device; the kids weren’t permitted to mess with this one. Rosa, Andrea’s mother, is “an incredible archivist,” recording and organizing moments on film. Thanks to her mother, she says, “I did grow up recognizing the value of seeing and documenting.” In high school, she would carry around a point-and-shoot camera, taking pictures of her friends.
Through high school, Morales’ goal was to become a writer. As college approached, though, she felt insecure about her ability to write in English. (For the record, her command of her second language is fluent, inventive.) Photography turned out to be insecurity’s roundabout gift: a language to tell stories without any words at all.
photograph by andrea morales
Men who took part in the 1968 Sanitation Workers’ Strike hold hands during a prayer at Mason Temple on April 3, 2018, during a ceremony ahead of the 50th commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.
She was touring the University of Florida campus ahead of matriculating when she checked out the journalism school, and noticed information about the photojournalism program — not something she had considered prior. “That’s when it really all clicked in,” she remembers. Beyond handling an SLR camera in high school, when she took photos for the yearbook, she didn’t have much technical experience. And — maybe because the University of Florida is part of the SEC, fostering “sports-guy culture”; maybe because the two central professors were “both white men named John” — Morales found the program “long, hard, fraught.” That “sports-guy culture” fostered a technical, gear-driven approach that she says simply isn’t her. (“I still don’t think I’m the best technician when it comes to cameras, but you develop your own syntax in photography,” she says, “even if you’re working with your iPhone.”) One of the two professors named John led photojournalism students on a several-weeks-long trip to Latin America, where they were to execute a project. Morales completed a certificate in Latin American studies alongside her photojournalism coursework; she was gaining a language through which to understand globalization and its human-scale effects, and she saw that the photo expedition was “basically a course in the white gaze.”
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photograph courtesy andrea morales
Alexandra, Gabriela, and Andrea at Andrea’s graduation forher Master of Arts at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio in 2010. All three sisters had walked across a graduation stage that year earning their high school, undergraduate, and master’s degrees, respectively, so Rosa forced them to take this phototo send to the family back home in Peru.
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photograph courtesy andrea morales
Andrea andher sister Gabriela in Lima, Peru. 1988.
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photograph courtesy andrea morales
Andrea at Disney Worldin Orlando, Florida. 1990.
She had begun to ask herself questions then that she continues to ponder now: For whom is the work intended? What effects is the work designed to provoke? In her work with MLK50, Morales acknowledges that “sometimes it feels like there’s the people I’m telling stories about, and then there’s the people I’m telling stories to — and why are those different? I’m trying to translate someone’s struggle and, what, inspire pity? Pity doesn’t do shit.”
(Susan Sontag addressed these questions in her 2003 Regarding the Pain of Others, an argumentative companion to 1973’s On Photography: “If one feels that there is nothing ‘we’ can do — but who is that ‘we’? — and nothing ‘they’ can do either — and who are ‘they’? — then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.”)
Despite conflicted feelings about the geopolitics of it all, she saw the trip and her broader studies as a pathway to becoming a correspondent in Latin America — the “adventuring” mode she envisioned for herself. “That didn’t end up happening,” she says, adding, with a wry smile, “I live in Oxford, Mississippi, now, so …”
photograph by andrea morales
Elmore Nickleberry hauls branches and waste into the truck he drives as a sanitation worker for the City of Memphis. For 63 mostly uninterrupted years, the rhythms of Nickleberry’s life have included the rumbles and roars of Memphis sanitation trucks. In 2017, at 85 and as the longest-tenured employee in the city’s history, Nickleberry still ran a Downtown route until 3 a.m.
For those of us who grew up at a certain time — like Morales, I was born in 1984 — the internal logic of a really solid mixtape is its own art form. The song sequence should feel at once foreordained and revelatory; reflective moments should follow harder-driving tracks; there might even be a tiny novel lurking in the connections from one song to the next.
Mixtape logic comes up when I ask about the more contemplative, quiet shots — often absent any human figures — that she splices between energetic, populated, high-octane photos. She explains, “You want to reach for sensory elements whenever possible. The syntax is really seen through the sequencing; you want interludes.”
A slumped tangle of wisteria, the sweetness of the blossoms wafting up through my monitor. A teddy-bear memorial attached to a utility pole. An unidentified man, back turned to us, on a church dais. Another man in another church, wiping his face with a white cloth. Many of her photos show activity, purpose, community — those bursts of life all the more vivid thanks to softer, quieter interludes.
She may not have wound up a foreign correspondent, but Morales has charted a course through the U.S. that has brought her into all manner of communities. After graduating from college, she earned a master’s degree in photography from Ohio University. She questioned the wisdom of working in newsrooms, local daily papers having been in such steep decline.
photograph by andrea morales
Wisteria crawls through bramble in South Memphis on April 3, 2018.
But then came an internship at The New York Times, which started her on her way as a working photojournalist. She worked at El Sentinel in South Florida; at the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, New York; at the Lima News in the aforementioned Lima, Ohio. Before her move to Memphis, she spent the longest consecutive time, post-college, in Concord, New Hampshire, at the Concord Monitor, a paper with a “strong tradition of community journalism, and community photojournalism.”
She was in a long-distance relationship at the time with a partner, fellow photojournalist Brad Vest, in Memphis, and Morales moved south in 2014 to join him. She remembers arriving in town a week before Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri, in early August. Morales’ understanding of Memphis, before she moved here, was based on “common mythological understanding. Getting here, being here, was totally different. I knew about Dr. King, I knew about the Lorraine,” she says, “but I just didn’t know.”
Following Brown’s death in Ferguson, cities across the country rose up in protest; the Movement for Black Lives was building momentum after the 2013 killing of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. As a new Memphian, Morales remembers “kind of holding my breath. I remember thinking, ‘This is a city that’s part of the country’s civil rights history, and has this particularly dark chapter. Surely there’ll be a response.’ It didn’t really happen here. It was pretty quiet.” She now understands Memphis’ relative slowness to rise up in protest as a conditioned trauma response to Dr. King’s assassination in 1968. “The silence isn’t that,” she says. “It’s that organizing in Memphis has been met with a pretty oppressive response, a fatal response.”
photograph by andrea morales
Bertrand Andrus, 21, at home in Greenville, Mississippi. Andrus lives with severe autism and his aging grandmother as his primary caretaker. Morales photographed the family for the Washington Post as part of a story about people on long Medicaid waiting lists.
Hungry for community, Morales remembers attending “every parade I could, because I love parades — never get tired of them. And I started going to protests.” She got to know community members who were motivated and activated to create change, and building a new body of work both through personal interactions and larger gatherings. Around the same time, Wendi Thomas had returned to Memphis from a Neiman Fellowship at Harvard, with the idea to create MLK50. Morales had followed Thomas on Twitter and admired her work, and raised her hand when she heard that Thomas was searching for local journalists to join the project.
Morales has found her work with MLK50 fulfilling — it’s enabled her to forge deep connections within the community, and she says that collaborating with Thomas has brought “a different depth to my understanding of the systems, and I think that has informed my photography.” Meanwhile, Thomas comments that Morales “teaches me so much — I’m lucky to have her as a partner on this journey to make, as the late Rep. John Lewis would say, good trouble.”
For Morales, photographing in Memphis requires being a part of the local community — not just observing the community, but integrating herself within it. In this approach, she’s acutely aware of “the privileges that my identity affords me.” Memphis is a 64 percent Black city, and while Morales identifies as a person of color, she is still “a person who’s not Black photographing in Black communities frequently.” In the past year, especially, she’s scrutinized that position. How can journalism better serve communities? How can we distinguish between work that demands justice and work that provokes pity? Where are the lines? Sontag again: “So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence.”
photograph by andrea morales
Landon Montgomery, 18, hangsout in his room with his dog, Bentley, in Florence, Alabama. Mr. Montgomery came out five years agoand was kicked out of his Christian middle school for it. He began attending public school where he came into his own through the support of his family, friends, and theater community.
For a photographer who is drawn to protests and parades, to near-sacred moments of communion with those on the other side of her lens, the pandemic poses challenges both logistical and personal. Approaching strangers is fraught; folks are anxious, and with good reason, about physical nearness.
Morales recalls being on a recent assignment for The Washington Post. She traveled to a community outside Atlanta called Doraville. She sat outside a soccer gym packed with people, most maskless, debating with herself: “I know if I go in there, I will get a picture that will be useful to this story. And I can’t go in there.” But she didn’t feel right staking out at the entrance, either, to photograph people outdoors when they exited: “Then I’m just sitting outside of this place with a camera, and that’s big surveillance energy.” No good options.
“I think a lot about who chronicles this draft of history. In the past, the story has been told through the lens of white men. Thanks to Andrea, the story will be told through the lens of a Latina, a first-gen American, a woman, someone who, at her core, is in solidarity with the people Dr. King was in solidarity with.” — Wendi Thomas
She made some photographs over Zoom in April 2020 for The New York Times. To make the photos, she met with people over the video-conferencing platform, and worked with them to arrange screenshots of them in their living spaces. This, she says, was “a rough experiment.” She was photographing a story about people facing housing instability during the pandemic. “These are people struggling with resources,” she says, “and I was like, ‘Do you want to jump on Zoom?’” Typically in her work, Morales tries to make her presence feel comfortable and noninvasive; composing what would essentially be a screenshot through a web conferencing service does not necessarily meet that goal. The socioeconomics struck her, too: She couldn’t help but think about the power differential between herself and her subjects (she prefers the term ‘collaborators’).
photograph by andrea morales
Proctor Wilson’s grandson peeks through the screen door of Wilson’s home at Foote Homes in 2015. The public housing project would be demolished two years later in order to break ground on the mixed-income community known as South City.
All of which is to say, she is genuinely (if cautiously) looking forward to what’s next. Morales tells me she wants to be back in Memphis full-time within the next year, once she finishes the MFA she’s working on at the University of Mississippi. She wants to be working full-time at MLK50, instead of splitting her time in so many directions. And she has a vision for “developing a space in Memphis for visual journalism and visual expression rooted in the goal of liberation.” In her conceptualization, this space would generate visual conversations — not just among working photographers, but community members, too. (Collaborators, not subjects.)
As we talk, morning light streams through the windows of Morales’ Oxford apartment. A cat named Big Rick perches behind her head, then wanders off to find another sunbeam. Lily Bear, my dog, snoozes curled on a sofa behind me. I find myself feeling like we’ve stepped into a hall of mirrors as we talk via Zoom interview about the weird, immediate intimacy of Zoom photo shoots.
As we’re wrapping up the conversation, one of our internet connections shakes, falters. Her face freezes on my screen, and I hear her voice say I’ve frozen on hers. A moment later, the connection breaks up entirely and I’m alone in my study again. So close, so far away.
About this series: Memphis has played muse over the years to artists across the spectrum, from the music of Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Al Green, and the collective at Stax Records, to the prose of Peter Taylor, Shelby Foote, and John Grisham. Visual artists, too, have been inspired by Memphis, whose look has been described as gritty, dirty, active, eerie, beautiful, and captivating.
“The Mind’s Eye” profiles the photographers whose work documents the city. Past stories in the series — featuring Bob Williams, Murray Riss, Saj Crone, Karen Pulfer Focht, Willy Bearden, Jamie Harmon, Brandon Dill, Ziggy Mack, and Ernest Withers — are showcased in our digital archives.
