Editor’s note: This is the final day of our visual end-of-year project. 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. Read day one and day two.
This story was updated on May 27, 2025, with the correct spelling of Tyré Nichols name.
Photos can do much more beyond representing a past moment. They can also function as a platform or a spotlight carrying a gentle nudge or an explosive gaze. They are invitations to us to challenge our individual memory against a more collective one.
Putting people at the center is the unambiguous purpose of the photographs by Brandon Dill and Noah Stewart. The two are community-centered photographers self-trained to see the magic worth receiving every day and so are uniquely positioned to bear witness when called.
Brandon Dill
Despite the many things he’s seen in his 15 years of photographing everyday life, daily news and big stories in Memphis, Brandon Dill still found himself “knocked sideways” in 2023.
This is a year that started with weeks of mournful work while covering the killing of Tyré Nichols, 29, by Memphis police in January. His first image in his collection is a photograph of the makeshift memorial to Tyré that had been set up in Nichols’ neighborhood, where he was fatally beaten. In the noise of the work, deadlines, “compassion and outrage” of that time, Dill felt called to spend time making a photo that rendered the scale of grief over Nichols for its radiance.
As the year continued, his photos follow the inexplicable alchemy (or resilience) that some people have to channel that “grief into transformative grievance.” Protest, healing work and policy campaigns that were organized by groups such as DeCarcerate Memphis labored around campaigns calling unambiguously for justice in the killing of Nichols.
Along with an increase in crime (and its accompanying moral panic), many would feel alienated from their community. Instead, Dill’s photographs believe that our victories are possible and show us Memphis’ strengths through celebration, meditation and testimony. He invites the viewer of his images to reject succumbing to narratives of irreparable conflict that precede pushes for militarized policing. He reminds us of the message from Jillian Johnson, a progressive politician in Durham, North Carolina: “The safest communities don’t have the most cops; they have the most resources.”
Noah Stewart
As MLK50 established earlier this year, Noah Stewart is nearly acrobatic in his pursuit of documenting our shared world. His curiosity is boundless in the service of communicating the feeling of a place through the things that catch his eye.
He describes 2023 for him as a slower year than most since he’s focused on doing more to care for his mental health after a rough 2022. For him, this looked like bigger project ideas and fewer days spent hustling.
The first and last image are from TONE’s Juneteenth celebration in Orange Mound, an event he’s photographed a few times before. He said both images clearly encapsulate the feelings of family reunion that the party brought.
His slowed-down year let him travel and reflect, including a spontaneous trip to Los Angeles where he saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time. Stewart admits there is a singular thrill to photographing something for the first time. At the Southern Heritage Classic, he photographed moments in the game’s musical rituals from the sidelines (another first) with his camera’s aperture wide open to “let everything just blend together.”
“Sometimes there’s a vibration that promises a good day, an abundant day,”
Even with the thrill of the new, Stewart’s photographs carry a feeling of return. We see places that listen when we’re called to come back together for culture, for justice.
Andrea Morales is the visuals director for MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. Email her at andrea.morales@mlk50.com
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