This story was updated on May 27, 2025, with the correct spelling of Tyré Nichols name.
Much of photography’s strength lies in the medium’s ability to testify to what was.
In our reporting, our photography serves as evidence, centers the value of emotion and evokes possibilities. With the same diligence used to tell our stories, we shine light on harmful parts of our community that benefit from being obscured. We try to help preserve history to disarm erasure.
In order to create a more perfect collective history to take into 2024, we asked some of our regular contributors and other photographers in the community to share the five best images that resonate with what they saw, learned or felt this year. Each piece over the next three days will include a collection from two different photographers. We hope to continue traditions of remembering with y’all in the years to come.
Andrea Morales
In this sixth year as visuals editor at MLK50, I doubled down on using photography to bear witness to our community’s struggle and celebrations in equal measure. I know that memory can suffer when you wake up weary.
“Such is the power of the photograph, of the image, that it can give back and take away, that it can bind,” wrote bell hooks in her essay “In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life.”
As photographers, we make work to remember in the way that hooks reminds us we can: re-member by bringing together severed parts and fragments in order to behold the whole.
How we remember this year faces irreparable fracture in our memory because of the ongoing genocides, merciless economic inflation and the traumas we’re surviving. Our struggles and our joy are connected in Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “single garment of destiny.” But, ultimately, oppression creates fault lines causing the weight of the world to not be experienced evenly.
Photography can help reclaim our past, renew our bonds and, through it, we can recommit to finding ways of sharing that weight. As hooks says, if one searches the images carefully they will find “a recuperative, redemptive memory” with which to build a radical future.
Bailey Sullivan
Bailey Sullivan spent his year growing.
While that’s normal for a teenager, Sullivan was really invested in his growth as a photographer.
MLK50 heard from the art teacher at his school that he was an avid photographer with an interest in photojournalism. We asked him to share some images that help us understand what is worth taking away from 2023.
“My hope is to become consistent and to be able to look back on photos that I took, even if just a month ago, and to not be embarrassed, but proud of what my one month younger self was able to accomplish,” he said.
The photos in his collection represent different lessons he’s learned in his journey to visual storytelling. His mother was a photographer in the armed services, so his enthusiasm is deeply instilled.
“She made sure that I appreciated the art form and fostered my love of art and documentation of all varieties,” he said. “Photography is an incredible art form that can tell the true story behind a person and write a narrative that explores the depths of the human imagination.”
Andrea Morales is the visuals director for MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. Email her at andrea.morales@mlk50.com
This story is brought to you byMLK50: Justice Through Journalism, a nonprofit newsroom focused on poverty, power and policy in Memphis. Support independent journalism by making a tax-deductible donation today. MLK50 is also supported by these generous donors.