This Photography Studio Captured the Beauty of Black Life in the South. Soon Its Archive, Once Hidden Away, Will Have a New Museum Home

The Hooks brothers documented life and joy in Memphis during the 20th century. Their images will be put on public view when the Memphis Art Museum opens

Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent

June 18, 2026 3:15 p.m.

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When the Memphis Art Museum opens its massive flagship building to the public later this year, a special exhibition will serve as the inaugural centerpiece: “Making Beauty: Hooks Brothers Studio, 1907-1984,” a show dedicated to the eponymous Black-owned photography studio that documented life in the city’s African American community during much of the 20th century.

Owned and operated by brothers Henry A. Hooks Sr. and Robert B. Hooks, and then by their sons, the business ran from different locations across the city during much of the Jim Crow era. While the studio’s portraits included prominent figures such as educator Booker T. Washington and millionaire Robert R. Church, the majority of its frames featured everyday people celebrating graduations, weddings, sporting events and parties.

As Rick Rojas wrote for the New York Times in 2025, the Hooks Brothers were “the go-to photographers of Black life in a city renowned for it.” The studio’s motto, “Where There’s Beauty We Take It, Where There’s None We Make It,” inspired the exhibition’s title, the Art Newspaper’s Benjamin Sutton reports.

That more than 150 photographs from the studio are set to be showcased in a major gallery once seemed impossible. In 1979, a fire destroyed the studio and led to the closure of what had been the second-oldest continuously run African American business in Memphis. Its photographic archives were hidden away for decades.

Then private buyers purchased the collection and donated it to the National Civil Rights Museum and the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, which is changing its name to the Memphis Art Museum. That prompted preservationists to begin the process of caring for glass plates and aged nitrate film strips for what might add up to 75,000 images.

“It’s just so unique in terms of being such a long-term visual documentation of one community, one city,” Earnestine Jenkins, an art historian at the University of Memphis, told the Times. “It documents you. It documents your family. It documents your community. It documents your region. It documents Memphis.”

The Memphis Art Museum also announced that its new location will be free in perpetuity to residents of Shelby County, which includes Memphis and its surrounding suburbs.

“Culture is not something Memphis has. Culture is something Memphis is. And when our culture rises, Memphis rises with it,” Mayor Paul Young says in a statement. “Memphis Art Museum being free for every Memphian, forever, isn’t just a gift—it’s an invitation: to come in, to come back, and to come often.”

Built on the shores of the Mississippi River, the new 123,500-square-foot Memphis Art Museum campus is set to open in December. Occupying a full city block, it will boast substantially more gallery and public space than the previous location.

Curators are putting this extra space to good use. Joining the “Making Beauty” exhibition are some 19 “short stories” that will “bring works of art into conversation around shared themes, histories, materials, and ideas,” according to the museum.

Some of these stories include “Rhapsodies in Black,” an exhibition dedicated to the influence of free jazz on Black American abstractism over the last half-century and “The River Calling: Storytelling in Memphis and the Mississippi Delta,” focused on folklore, music and mythology in the American South.

“We hope that folks come and park at the museum and have an art experience, go have lunch with one of our restaurant partners downtown, go check out the civil rights museum, go see a show at the Orpheum, and then come back,” Jeff Rhodin, the museum’s chief revenue officer, told Action News 5’s Joyce Peterson and Lydian Coombs in November. “We want it to be a more holistic experience.”

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Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer and photographer from Chicago. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue, Sierra magazine, Discover magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal.