On a drizzly morning in mid-February, I drove to a low-slung, red-brick office park in South Memphis to watch a magic show. Stacks of Memphis magazine covers stood several feet high, next to a multi-chamber printing apparatus called an MGI machine. Occupying about as many square feet as my kitchen, the MGI machine allows Spark Printing to add touches like the ones on this month’s cover — the glossy varnish that helps you feel Larry Finch leap off the page, the foil embellishing the name of the magazine.
The Memphis area hasn’t seen a magazine cover like this one before. We knew we wanted to pick a very special issue to receive this special treatment — one that our readers might choose to keep for a long time. In a basketball-obsessed city like ours, the Tiger hoops centennial seemed a natural fit, and a classic photo of Larry Finch among the most singular images to select.
As excited as we are for you to hold the Finch cover in your hands, I wish we could somehow have printed two covers for one magazine, so that an Ernest Withers photo could grace newsstands and coffee tables all over the city.
My first memories of watching then-Memphis State basketball were created during Finch’s years coaching. I was in elementary school when Finch’s team included Penny Hardaway; your understanding of what college basketball looks like can be slightly skewed if that’s your first notion of normal. Memphis was still almost a decade away from welcoming a pack of Canadian grizzly bears into our midst. The Tigers are in a very different era now, with Hardaway as coach, and their 2019-2020 season has been one of both excitement and unrest. But they continue to capture Memphis’ collective heart.
I count it as a dynamite issue of this magazine when we publish more than one feature that definitely, without question deserves to be the cover story. As excited as we are for you to hold the Finch cover in your hands, I wish we could somehow have printed two covers for one magazine, so that an Ernest Withers photo could grace newsstands and coffee tables all over the city. Jesse Davis’ profile of Withers is the ninth in our annual Mind’s Eye series of explorations of Memphis photographers’ bodies of work. In these profiles, we explore the city and her inhabitants through the lenses of photographers who show us new perspectives on the place we think we know.
Until this year, the photographers featured have been our contemporaries; we’ve showcased the work and inclinations of Louis Tucker (a.k.a. Ziggy Mack), Brandon Dill, Jamie Harmon, Willy Bearden, Karen Pulfer Focht, Saj Crone, Murray Riss, and Bob Williams. But when Jesse brought up the idea for a Withers retrospective, we realized we could, well, as a photographer might, take a broader shot — pan out. Use a wider lens. If Larry Finch can come back to life, revivified as a college player on the cover of this magazine, then our Mind’s Eye subject can be someone we ‘interview’ by studying the vast collection of photos he created. Withers’ work presents the whole of the city as he inhabited it — there are the civil rights images that many may find familiar, but so too there are the music and entertainment images, and those captured in the quiet of private life. It’s a transformative collection, and I’m so glad we get to share new angles of it with you.
I think it would be safe to say that, until this month, you’ve never had the opportunity to read about — of all places — Finland in the pages of Memphis. Most months, we bring you travel stories about destinations within a manageable drive from Memphis, and I can tell you both from general obviousness and from personal experience that there is nothing remotely manageable (or possible) about driving to Finland from Memphis. But Aisling Mäki’s story has so much Memphis contained within it — and, moreover, is so well told — that we’re breaking our own rules. We do that from time to time around here; it’s the Memphis way. In an odd twist, I found myself in Finland only last summer, wandering through many of the same Helsinki sites Mäki mentions. You can’t get much farther from the Bluff City, yet our insistent city doesn’t allow you to forget it, even in Helsinki, where you hear Memphis blues in a random café, stumble upon a restaurant called Memphis, mention your home and wait to have the inevitable discussion about Elvis. Everywhere, people have stories to share about their connections with Memphis.
What an opportunity we have, in this magazine, which is both for and of this city: to tell the stories of the Memphis we breathe every day, right now. People as far away from here as Finland, and farther, know of our city — its basketball, yes, and its music, but also the struggle for civil rights that Withers documented, and more besides. The past remains animated here, leaping off the pages of history and into lively interaction with the present.
– Anna Traverse Fogle, CEO and Editor-in-Chief
