“I was fascinated with levitation and gravity,” Tucker says. To create this self-portrait, he used double exposure, and edited out the stool on which he balanced.
J. Louis “Ziggy” Tucker is either levitating or about to make friends with hard concrete. He’s suspended in midair, in any event, in a long exterior arcade. His hands are open, relaxed; his feet are poised and pointed, ready to glide up one of the brick columns flanking him. Behind rectangular glasses, his eyes — daring, imploring, slightly worried — gaze back at the viewer.
It’s a curious photo, one whose creation involved some visual trickery. It is also an image that absorbs and reflects so many of the elements that recur throughout Tucker’s body of work: portraiture and movement; stillness and softness; unlikely angles and uncanny abilities. A photograph can tell a story: About being on the threshold. About a moment the eye would blur, and miss, but that the camera’s lens freezes, holding in suspension. About the human body, and specifically the Black body: elemental, flowing, flying, free — contrasted with the heaving lead of expectations and constraints.
A dancer with Complexions Contemporary Ballet emerges from — or disappears into — the Vaillancourt Fountain in San Francisco.
Readers of this publication will recognize the name Ziggy Mack from his Street Style photos, which have been featured regularly since August 2018. Others know the photographer as J. Louis Tucker, his birth-certificate name, or as Fomoloop, his Instagram handle (@fomoloop), or simply as Ziggy. Tucker, 33, got his start as a photographer documenting the local nightlife scene, for club promoters; the photographs were posted to a site called In the Loop.
A quick primer on names: Tucker describes himself as having suffered from FOMO (fear of missing out), a byproduct of needing to be always in the loop, wherever the photo-worthy action might be happening. Hence, Fomoloop was born. And “Ziggy”? Well, that’s because of his quick-moving, at times verging on frenetic, energy. If you’re at an event he’s photographing, you’re likely to see Tucker crawling the aisle, or contouring acrobatically to get the shot he’s already framed in his mind’s eye. And Mack is his half-brother, Ken Mack’s surname.
Today, Tucker’s name (or, well, one of them) appears routinely alongside photos published by local media outlets (High Ground News, The Daily Memphian, Memphis Parent, the Memphis Flyer, Memphis magazine, and so on), and has turned up in some national publications, like Essence. He photographs a range of performing arts (dance, music, opera, spoken word, theater) and has worked with local and national commercial clients (Red Bull, lululemon, to name a few). Since leaving his day job of nine years at MLGW in early 2018, Tucker’s art is his livelihood. The central challenge of working solely as a freelance photographer, he has found, is managing time and project flow. “Irony is missing a meeting for project management,” he says, “because you didn’t manage your time correctly.”
Tucker is a product of Memphis and has commented that Memphis offers an unusually fertile proving ground for artists — you can experiment with new ideas here, and watch them grow; you can find support, should you want it, among fellow artists; you can connect with people in all walks of life and all industries more seamlessly than you might be able to elsewhere, in cities with more established scenes. But that doesn’t mean growing up here was without its challenges, for a kid like Louis Tucker who was into video games and the anime-inflected idea of Japan. “Nerd things,” he says: student council and band. While attending Whitehaven High School, he spent a summer with the Bridge Builders program, a leadership conference organized by the local nonprofit Bridges and intended to connect young people across demographic lines, empowering them to improve their communities.
“I’m in love with concrete — it’s all nostalgia, and brutalism,” Tucker says. His photograph of a dancer whose limbs seem to have been pulled by multiple magnets was taken outside Memphis Fire Station #5 at Front and Union.
On the 33rd day of the 2018-19 federal government shutdown, Tucker captured this image of a Puerto Rican man who “looked like he was snaking down a big wall” outside the Federal Building in downtown Memphis.
Tucker’s photographs often communicate emotional tension. A photo of a dancer in a battle against gravity “was subconsciously a response to me identifying in a world that didn’t look like me or have my interests in mind.”
Prior to Bridge Builders, Tucker, who played trumpet in his high school’s marching band, had planned, loosely, to continue with marching band through college, likely at a historically black college. He had been raised in a musical family. His father would play the drums at home — fusion jazz, mostly, and at church, too (not much fusion jazz there). Tucker says, “Pretty much the only thing I looked forward to on Sundays was him playing.” So when he started on the trumpet, and his band was one of the top in the region — it seemed to follow that he should continue down that very neatly trodden path. To this day, hearing a college marching band, one of the really good ones, where every player is working as part of the whole, “the hair on my neck still rises every time,” he says.
But Tucker began to reevaluate the HBCU idea in Bridge Builders. He already knew he was curious about, he says, “things that are not really standard for what you would think Black people like” — things like “breakdancing, futurism in general, futurism in fashion, Malcolm Gladwell, anthropology.” Wanting a broader experience, he wound up at Christian Brothers University, where he majored in psychology.
A “B-side” to a Memphis magazine Street Style photoshoot. “The subject speaks about depression and how it’s always there, whether dormant or attacking you.” Tucker’s signature elements recur here: concrete, light and shade, a sense of pushing from one dimension into another.
In Bridge Builders, one summer while he was in college, Tucker was tasked with documenting the goings-on at the junior camp, using a still video camera. Despite the non-standard equipment, and the total lack of training (he has learned “by my wits — and lots of failure”), Tucker found he had a natural eye, and an ability to capture people in revealing, authentic moments. Though he had been drawn to visual art in earlier years, he had not pursued it seriously because, he says, “You know how some people, they won’t do something because they want it to be perfect the first time? Yeah, that was me.” Photography’s relatively immediate results, combined with the freedom of being able to shoot frame after frame, afforded him a less mediated, fraught relationship with the final creative product.
Tucker graduated from college in 2008, at the height of the financial crisis. Getting a job just about anywhere proved difficult. He took a position as a retail manager at Abercrombie & Fitch, to make ends meet, and worked there for a few years, then moved to the MLGW gig, where he was procuring contracts (“I was a reverse bill collector,” he explains). His mother and brother joined forces to get him a camera, and that “gave me a reason to go out, for sport. I started out with nightlife photography, then it got warm really quick.” He shot parties, events, the local club scene, starting to make a name for himself. He tells stories of taking photos in clubs with the camera hoisted up into the air, snapping blind, or the time he snagged a perfect shot with the camera over his shoulder, pointed behind him, as he walked away from the subject. He was working at a frenetic-even-for-him pace for a few years, between the day job and the nightlife photography.
A woman appears to have risen to the meniscus of the water — or perhaps the surface of another dimension — only to be propelled back, bouncing off the edge between here and there.
When Louis Tucker was 27, in the aftermath of a “pretty bad breakup,” he remembers, one day “I thought I was having a stroke. Shooting pains through my left arm, lots of stress, chest pains, tension.” He went to the ER, then a thoracic surgeon, and the consensus was clear. Tucker had a mass lodged between his heart and his left lung. The mass was lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph nodes. A lightning strike. I ask what the diagnosis was like for him — was he scared? Nah. He was more worried about his parents, who he knew would fear for him, and more unmoored by the breakup, than he was frightened by the cancer.
But the cancer did hasten a new chapter of Tucker’s photography. For one, he felt a sense of urgency about getting his work out into the world. Conscious that “so many artists have died in their 27th year,” he wanted to have his portfolio “organized, and out there, if I did happen to die.” So he spent time while in the hospital — he would go for in-patient chemotherapy, one week per month — digitally cataloguing his photos.
Spending time in the hospital changed Tucker’s aesthetic, too. Looking at “all that white,” all that antiseptic blankness, urged him toward a more minimal aesthetic still present in much of his work today. It was in the hospital, too, that Tucker began spending time on Instagram, gathering inspiration and broadening his sense of direction as a photographer.
He traveled to Key Largo, Florida, to photograph a group of mermaids in their, er, natural habitat.
Water. Movement. Flowing, and floating. After cancer and the difficult breakup that preceded it, Tucker began experimenting with underwater photography. “I was fascinated with levitation,” he says, “and gravity. So the easiest thing to do was to go in the water.” Being underwater has afforded Tucker access to a certain otherworldliness, to moments when people appear to hover at the surface dividing one world from another.
One senses in Tucker’s underwater work that he’s doing more than making beautiful, graceful images. He’s contending with what it feels like to sink almost to the bottom of existence — to feel the sort of suspended animation one might while in a hospital for long stretches of time, say — and then to rise to the edge of the air again, altered now by depths plumbed. In one remarkable photo (see above), a woman appears to have risen to the meniscus of the water — or perhaps the surface of another dimension — only to be propelled back, bouncing off the edge between here and there.
Tucker also has interrogated the edges between communities of people and the places where those edges become aqueous, permeable. He’s photographed members of what he describes as subcultures — punk, Afro-punk, underground hip-hop, and smaller niche groups, like those who gather for mermaid conventions every so often. His entries into these worlds, to document the experiences of those within them, have been made possible largely by the world of social media.
“She’s my mermaid friend!” Tucker says of this finned and tailed woman.
“When I was just learning photography, it was different; subcultures weren’t just there,” he says. “I didn’t find my own tribe when I was younger — you only just were part of your environment. The additional environment [of social media] has broadness, so you can find the people, you can pull in the things, and you can be a more authentic you.” He’s found his way into an expansive array of worlds, always thinking about the story behind the shot, the way his eye and lens unite a disparate range of subjects.
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Tucker is always thinking about how to capture images that “hark to a world the viewer may not be a part of.”
Seen here: the MLK50 #IAM2018 march; a protest of the 2018 travel ban; a man with a rebel flag in Mississippi; faces in the crowd at a Black Lives Matter rally following the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012.
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Tucker is always thinking about how to capture images that “hark to a world the viewer may not be a part of.”
Seen here: the MLK50 #IAM2018 march; a protest of the 2018 travel ban; a man with a rebel flag in Mississippi; faces in the crowd at a Black Lives Matter rally following the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012.
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Tucker is always thinking about how to capture images that “hark to a world the viewer may not be a part of.”
Seen here: the MLK50 #IAM2018 march; a protest of the 2018 travel ban; a man with a rebel flag in Mississippi; faces in the crowd at a Black Lives Matter rally following the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012.
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Tucker is always thinking about how to capture images that “hark to a world the viewer may not be a part of.”
Seen here: the MLK50 #IAM2018 march; a protest of the 2018 travel ban; a man with a rebel flag in Mississippi; faces in the crowd at a Black Lives Matter rally following the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012.
Time has a habit of dilating when you’re in the hospital. Minutes feel like hours, and hours feel like days, yet days feel like minutes. It’s disorienting, and, for most people, makes thinking about anything beyond the most immediate circumstances all but impossible. While being treated for lymphoma, Tucker had a quantity of hour-minute-days to consider what his work meant, what purpose it served, and where he himself fit into the photos he made.
“I had this mantra: one style. Because I realized I would shoot clubs one way, portraits another way, and so on, and they never really intersected. It was like I was two photographers. I was multiple people doing the same thing.” There was his nightlife and club photography; then there was portrait work and photojournalism; there was fashion and fine art; there was dance.
When he started to think about how to piece it all together — how to be one artist rather than several photographers working in tandem — Tucker’s work began to sing, a harmony of softness and starkness, fluid movements undergirded by architectural elements. He found himself more in demand, commercially and editorially.
Prior to writing this story, I sorted through Tucker’s portfolio, the 100 or so photos he curated and uploaded to a Dropbox folder. It’s a vibrant mixture of all the ingredients of his work, full of lots of interesting faces, a few of whom I recognize (because Memphis continues to be Memphis), but most of whom I cannot place. And then, as I was advancing the “next” button, appeared, unmistakably, Barack Obama.
A fellow photographer called Tucker one day in spring 2011. “I remember it like it was yesterday,” he says. “I was driving past Midtown Yoga. He was like, ‘Yo, Zig. I’m trying to build a team to photograph Barack Obama.’ And I’m like, ‘Uh, yes.’”
The photo was taken in May 2011, when Booker T. Washington High School, in South Memphis, won the national Race to the Top High School Commencement Challenge.
The very existence of the photo evidences Tucker’s movement toward a unified yet multifaceted style. He got a call to come shoot the event because of his connections in the club scene; a friend who was assembling a small team to photograph the commencement called him, knowing his nimbleness as a photographer. At first, he remembers, he was corralled with the other news photographers, a couple hundred feet away from the stage. Even with a powerful zoom, a photo taken from that distance is prone to looking “flat,” lacking contour and shading. So Tucker did what someone who goes by Ziggy does: He zigged and zagged and got himself closer to the stage, after the main event was over and Obama was handing out diplomas. Though the photo was never published anywhere, until now, Tucker knew immediately that he got the shot.
His perfectionism hasn’t left him. While we’re talking about the Obama photo, Tucker gestures at the brightness illuminating one corner of the image. It’s just the way the light splashed his lens, and that light lends the photo a liveliness that feels right, as if the whole scene were framed with light and hope. But Tucker looks almost apologetic when he explains, “I remember I was shooting like crazy, making sure I got the shot. I was like, ‘Yes.’ Well, outside of this. This is lens flare, but outside of that…”
Louis Tucker is never quite satisfied. That’s what makes his work so much fun to follow: No matter how much you like what you’ve seen, chances are he’s got something you haven’t imagined yet, waiting somewhere up his sleeve.
