THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER

An earnest photographic exploration of some key loci of the Southern civil rights movement and its aftermath.

“We are a country born of slavery followed by one hundred years of codified legal racism,” writes Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, in her stirring, too-brief foreword. She lands on a key point: the “ordinariness” of the images by Abranowicz, a commercial and travel photographer. Those photographs sometimes speak volumes, as with the juxtaposition of a literacy test imposed on Black voters in Alabama—one that few college-educated Whites would be able to pass—with a street view of the tiny house where a Mississippi minister working to register the voters once lived until being gunned down by an unknown assassin in 1955. That’s just one instance of the many recorded here of ordinary violence against Black people young and old during the time of Jim Crow and that continues to be inflicted on them today in so many forms—including the near-indentured work of the imprisoned population, an example of which Abranowicz locates in a Birmingham steel mill. The understated narrative arc suggests that, as one section title has it, there is hope for redemption. As Abranowicz notes, commenting on a photograph of a dirt road, Greenwood, Mississippi, was once a cotton center, then a “hotbed of voter-registration activity and protest in the 1960s,” and finally a place where a Black woman was elected mayor in 2006. A few errors creep into the text—e.g., Jefferson Davis was not alive in 1898 to dedicate what is correctly known as the Confederate Memorial Monument—and some of the photos are merely average. The best of them, though, depict people who continue the fight today, such as Florida lawyer Desmond Meade, who advocates against a modern “poll tax” imposed on ex-felons.

Of interest as a visual record of ordinary places now exalted in history and memory.