Hi, I'm Zora J. Murff. I'm a photographer and a professor at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, Arkansas. I've been practicing photography for the past decade. I think my intention with photography is to more deeply question social structures, and then how photography has existed in that throughout American history. At No Point In Between, as a body of work, I had started categorizing it in two different ways. On one level, it's this complicated time experience relating different forms of anti-Black violence in America, and how that has appeared throughout history, how photography has played a role in that. I also describe it as maybe an archive with my lived experience between the years of 2015 and 2018. Watching the footage of Macon McDonald's murder, that was the first time that I had decided I was going to watch that type of video and see that type of image, knowing that I was going to watch somebody die. Starting to make At No Point In Between, finding these deeper histories, the history of spectacle lynching in the United States, the history of redlining Black neighborhoods, all of that stuff became quickly entangled. I think my key takeaway from that was that these phenomena are so deeply intertwined, and at the end of the day, what they're designed to do is erase Black people. To me, the spectacle lynching is the redlining of a neighborhood, is the murder of a Black teenager being shot 16 times. An easy way to explain redlining is that it's just economic disenfranchisement done through housing. Homeownership was a primary wealth-building tool in America. For instance, there's an underwriting manual that was published by the federal government, which was then used by Home Owners' Loan Corporation, I believe, if a neighborhood is about to integrate, that neighborhood will inherently lose value. So you want to keep Black people in the Black neighborhood, White people in the White neighborhood, and you don't want to mix those up. The phenomenon is called "redlining" because there were literal red lines drawn around maps. That's the way they would visually determine what areas had value. In "Terri (talking about the freeway), I was trying to find ways to point out the ways in which the landscape tells us these things. If we decide to read it in a more critical light, it's referring to the North Freeway, I think it's Interstate 480. It was originally supposed to be built through a majority of White neighborhood. That of course, couldn't be the case and so it was eventually built through North Omaha, leading to this mass displacement of people, the splintering of a community, all of these things. That's a narrative that's common throughout the United States, it's not just particular to North Omaha. I was at this apartment complex, the freeway runs behind it. It made a really nice easy visual. I was in that spot making this image. Then as I was leaving, Terri pulls out and leans out of her window and is like, "What are you photographing?" I was like, "Oh, I'm photographing the freeway." Then she was like, "Oh, why?" So I started talking about the history of redlining. She's like, "Oh, I just read something about that recently." Then we were talking about the history of the freeway, and then how I, as a photographer, am trying to use it in this very particular way for this specific purpose. The way I tried to normalize that process of making people's portraits was to let the conversation lead. Terri, for instance, I just found a good spot with good light, and she took a seat on it, and then she started posing. As I was reloading my film, she stayed holding herself, and then she just rested her head over so slightly on her arm. I was just looking at her as she did that, and I was like, "Okay, if you could please just hold that pose." I knew taking that photograph, that it was going to be a portrait that would be included in At No Point In Between. Chris (talking about fear), that photograph was a moment where the conversation just happened. I was walking through the neighborhood out photographing. I saw him standing, he had this bright blue shirt on against this pink cinder block building, and I was like, "Well, those colors are really beautiful." Then I approached him, and we just started talking. He saw my camera and asked what I was out photographing, and so I explained the work that I'm making and things that I'm talking about. We just got into natural conversation about this idea of fear. What does it mean to be a Black man in America? What are the ways in which people see you? Why are we marked as threats in these many different ways, again, like these tangible histories that exist with the act of spectacle lynching. A lot of those lynchings were perpetrated under the guise of protecting White womanhood, and often the narrative spun was that a Black man raped a White woman, and then crafting that into the stereotype that all Black men are rapists, and therefore, should be seen as dangerous. He and I, to just be engaged in that discussion as two Black individuals and then thinking about this fear response, but then how fear is a regular lived experience for us everyday. Being afraid of existing in the world, being afraid of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, all of the ways in which fear is wrapped up in our daily experience. He had just gotten his haircut and had a lot of stray hairs. I think one had like gotten in his eye and he just went to brush his eye. Again, seeing that and that gesture resonating, and recognizing that as a moment, I felt that needed to be photographed. Largely, my experience with photography has been whenever I'm out in the public, I get asked a lot of questions under this guise that I'm there as a threatening presence. Whereas in North Omaha, people had questions, but it was just more like a genuine curiosity as to why, "Why are you photographing this neighborhood? Nobody takes pictures here." It was through those conversations that I was able to listen to people, who had lived there, who were familiar, who grew up with these histories and stories. I think I was thinking about how Black people show up in imagery at large. You don't often see these normalized experiences of Blackness, Blackness on a daily basis. The more that I thought about it, the more I had this desire to highlight how Black life has always persisted. We focus so intensely on these narratives of our death, but we're very much alive and always have been. It was crucial to me to include those representations as a way to affirm that they existed, that they were here, that their life had value.
