M-TOWN
M Town is a contemporary portrait of Memphis and the surrounding edges of Arkansas and Mississippi—the area where I was raised, shaped by, and continue to interrogate. It maps a psychological terrain shaped by contradiction: cultural richness and disparity, humor and threat. There’s a stillness to some scenes, but it’s not peaceful. These images attempt to express what it feels like to live in a place that forms you without your immediate knowledge or consent. A place that loves and wounds at once.
Historically, the city sits on land stolen from the Chickasaw and Cherokee Nations. The Trail of Tears passed in front of my childhood home. Memphis grew into the world’s largest spot cotton market—an economy built on the forced labor of enslaved African Americans. Its soil holds centuries of violence. This place was also a flashpoint for Civil Rights struggle and where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. That legacy is not past tense. It lingers in the atmosphere, in the economy, the racially separated neighborhoods and the lives of those still here.
