Celebrating women’s achievements in any field can be an elusive enterprise, as there’s an inherent diversity in what we consider the female, the feminine, the femme. Yet it’s something we do to correct the tendency to give women short shrift (and lesser pay). These systemic tendencies have been rearing their ugly heads more recently, positively reinforced by governmental zealots who make no secret of their anti-trans sadism, or their desire to return to the pre-suffrage social norms of patriarchy. In the photographic world, such devolutionary sentiments are often typified by the implied “male gaze” of the masculine photographer, a P.O.V. that is, among other things, prone to objectify women, or favor gestures of passivity over action.
Memphis is a magnet of some notoriety in the photographic world, its twin poles in that regard roughly being Ernest Withers’ photojournalism and William Eggleston’s abstract aesthetics, but the prolific nature of both artists can obscure other stellar photographic work being done here, especially by women or femme-identifying photographers. Before this Women’s History Month closes out, then, let’s raise a toast to the local sisters who are bucking the trends, pursuing their visions, and upending the “male gaze.”
Ebet Roberts
Though she’s lived mainly in New York City for decades, Ebet Roberts has the Bluff City inscribed in her soul, continuing to keep her Midtown Memphis apartment to accommodate her frequent returns. That’s been true throughout her thriving career as a music photographer since the ’70s. All of those threads were woven into her recent appearance at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art’s exhibit, “Memphis College of Art, 1936-2020: An Enduring Legacy.” Speaking at the show’s pre-opening press gathering, Roberts’ enthusiasm for her striking shot of Sid Vicious playing the Taliesyn Ballroom with the Sex Pistols at their 1978 Memphis debut was contagious.
“Memphis was crazy in those days,” she recalled. “There were headlines saying ‘the Sex Pistols will not be allowed to perform simulated sex acts on stage.’ So this show was grossly oversold. I don’t even know how I got in there. And I don’t know how I got this photograph, because the floor was going up and down. I mean, people were jumping and spitting. I was sure I was going to be in the basement any minute. It was crazy! It’s amazing it came out. I really didn’t know if I was gonna have a giant blur. Anyway, it started my career.”
David Robinson, Elliot Easton and Ric Ocasek of The Cars with photographer Ebet Roberts in the dressing room at the “Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder” in New York City on November 24, 1981. 
Blondie performing at My Father’s Place in Roslyn, Long Island, New York on June 1, 1978. 
Patti Smith performing at the Asbury Park Convention Hall in Asbury Park, New Jersey on August 5, 1978.
That last point is only partially true, her career having “started” a year before that, when she photographed the band Mink DeVille in New York. By then, she’d already studied at MCA, focused on painting but devoting her final year to studying photography with Murray Riss. Moving to New York, with a detour to study camerawork at the Penland School of Craft, she found the late ’70s in Manhattan to be a hotbed of musical innovation. Snapping the music scenes around CBGB and Max’s Kansas City, her work was suddenly in demand.
Key to Roberts’ magic was pushing beyond the superficial. “I wanted to follow up on the things I photographed instead of just walking around documenting things, then walking away,” she told Bruce VanWyngarden for Memphis Magazine in 2024. That was partly due to the inspiration of the music she heard then. Shooting bands, never something she’d previously aspired to, “just opened up this whole world,” she says. “I was so unaware of it, and it was just so exciting and creative, something that I’d never seen or heard before. I felt like I absolutely had to document it.”
And so, feeling that “composition and design was so ingrained in me” by her painting studies at MCA, she ran with the momentum, eventually snapping Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, David Bowie, Whitney Houston, Miles Davis, and many others. (See her photo of Tina Turner on the Flyer’s February 15th, 2023, cover.)
The work has never stopped rolling in. But along the way, her own identity was of a secondary concern to that of the artist in her lens. “I just never thought about the difference of being a woman particularly,” she says. “I was friends with most of the male photographers. I think this awareness came when I was photographing U2, at the beginning. Somebody sent me a photo of me in the photo pit with the other photographers. And, I mean, I’m not that short, but, being around all these heavy-duty news guys from around the country, I look like a complete midget!”
One is reminded of the wisdom of T. Rex: “I know I’m small, but I enjoy living anyway.” Meanwhile, she persists — and continues to thrive. SUNY Press will release a collection of her work from the ’70s and ’80s, Ebet Roberts: New York Punk, this October.
Gabrielle Yasmeen
Gabrielle Yasmeen (Photo: Courtesy Gabrielle Yasmeen)
At the other end of the spectrum, we move from an established name in the business to a photographer who’s relatively new to the game. But that’s not how it seems to Gabrielle Yasmeen, who’s been snapping photos all her life. She admits that’s true of most people in her generation, all digital natives who live and breathe images on social media. “I do think that, yes, there’s a line between a photo dump on Instagram versus a thought-out, cohesive body of photographic work. I would say it comes down to narrative, with a through line that leads back to something.” But Yasmeen’s frustrated that not everyone sees photography that way, even art galleries.
“I’ve had gallerists tell me, like, ‘We don’t feature photography because it doesn’t sell,’” she says. In her experience, respect for any photography, much less that created by women, is not easy to come by. “It’s that same fine art narrative that elevates painting and sculpture and, even now, craft art to a higher standard.” And so Yasmeen, having learned the ropes through a job at the UrbanArt Commission, took matters into her own hands and curated a show there last year titled “Not Only Seen, But Felt: An Exhibition of Seven Black Women Photographers.”
That show, featuring the work of Yasmeen, A.C. Bullard, Ariel J. Cobbert, Alexus Milons, Jasmine Marie, Keara W., and MadameFraankie, explored, per the show’s accompanying literature, “themes of love, community, family, labor, and remembrance, while also celebrating the quiet, everyday moments that are often overlooked yet deeply meaningful.”
“I’ve always heard seven is a number of completion,” says Yasmeen. “And so I was like, ‘Let me just start with seven, though I know there’s a huge amount of people with talent in this city. And it was, to me, a transformative body of work that came together. It made all of us kind of question our paths, our careers, and what we were going to do next.”
And it only confirmed Yasmeen’s feeling that photography was the best medium to capture our lives. “Having that show was a declaration of photography being something that is meaningful,” she says. “All those images showcased life, and for me, Black life in Memphis, and how we are able to live, work, and play — all those different elements of human life.” That, in turn, made her feel part of a larger historical movement in Memphis photography. “We have the Hooks Brothers, and we have Ernest Withers, who were all capturing specifically Black life in Memphis” — often rendered nigh invisible in the mass media and fine arts worlds.
One lesson Yasmeen took away from the show was the need for a sense of community among women photographers. “I reached out to Andrea Morales because she’d had her first solo museum exhibition at the Brooks at that time, and I had known about her work for a few years, being a fan. We met in different situations, and it was really helpful to go to her and say, ‘Hey, would you review this? Would you look at this? Would you just give me your thoughts?’ It gave me confidence to do curation for the first time.”
The upshot of such epiphanies has been Yasmeen’s conviction that the city needs a center for photography, “a space where we could continue to educate one another, learn more, and have real formal training in photography,” she says, pointing to similar institutions in New York, Miami, and Los Angeles. “That’s what was born out of the show: a need to have a continuing education center in a gallery that is dedicated to photography.”
Andrea Morales (Photo: Courtesy Andrea Morales)
Andrea Morales
And what of the photographer who inspired Yasmeen to ramp things up? Born
in Peru, raised in Miami, not Memphis, unlike like our other featured artists, An-
drea Morales has nonetheless tapped into the moods, gestures, and light of Memphis
communities like no other, given her fine-tuned photojournalist’s instincts, honed over decades. Yet for much of her career, photojournalism was not her path into the gallery — quite the opposite.
“I’ve mostly worked in newspapers and newsrooms,” she says, “so I had never been on a track to go into museums. A very young communist version of me was almost like, ‘No! People can’t get to it at the museum!’ And with artists like Gabrielle, who are more documentary-based, I think their forms of photography in particular are considered less precious objects on a wall and more kind of like, you know, receipts. Receipts about what happened.”
November 26, 2025: MEMPHIS, TN – Members of Alianza De Danzantes De Memphis perform in the parking lot of La MIchoacana ice cream shop during a Nov. 26 vigil for deported neighbors along Summer Avenue. The event was organized by the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition’s youth council to serve as a space for community grief for all the families that have been separated by the work of the Memphis Safe Task Force. Photo by Andrea Morales / MLK50 
June 10, 2017 – Betty Isom’s Tate Street Block Party.
Yet Morales’ work contradicts this tendency with her sensitivity to the telling detail, the “decisive moment.” A man with “Memphis” inked onto his back is framed so the tattoo itself rises into the air like the city’s skyline. A young Black girl’s pink parka frames a photo she holds, Ernest Withers’ portrait of the 1968 sanitation workers. Morales’ eye evokes the more painterly influences that Roberts speaks of, something the local fine art world is waking up to. “There’s a devalorization of our work that we’re working around here. But at the same time, Memphis has that thing where it lets you, like, thrive.”
She’s speaking in part of her own solo show at the Brooks Museum last year, “Roll Down Like Water.” But she’s also speaking of a more positive general trend in the city. “I think particularly in creative space-making, since 2014 there have been a number of different projects that have come and gone and that we’ve learned from.” One of which was the Brooks’ 2019 exhibit, “Photography in Memphis,” both a celebration of and a reckoning with the history of the city through the work of 56 photographers, reaching back as early as 1849. Morales feels that was important not just for local women photographers, but photographers of color more generally. “I wish there was a way to look back at that 2019 show and see exactly how many were femme, non-binary photographers, and how many were men. In any case, it was really good.”
She points to a number of photographers of color who compared favorably to more celebrated names’ visions. “Lawrence Matthews turns that gaze, which I think is an entitled gaze, he turns it within, where Eggleston is always turning it without and usually emphasizing a power dynamic between the person behind the lens and the one in front of the lens — that I feel is always a little gross.”
Morales, for her part, is very aware of power dynamics when she’s on a shoot, dating back at least as far as her years on assignments for the Commercial Appeal, long before she took on her current role as visuals editor for MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. “I ran to opportunities I got through the Commercial Appeal,” she says, “like, you know, at a church in Frayser. I got to go to Frayser knowing the power of community journalism, knowing that I was going to see places I wouldn’t see otherwise, and be able to really connect with them. Because photography is like a means of communion for me: going into any space, whether it’s full of people who look like me or full of people very different from me. The reason I do photography is because it gives me this tool to connect and commune with people who are separate from the designs of the systems that we live under, in a really meaningful way. I’m more driven by curiosity and a shared love for people and their stories.”
Duffy-Marie Arnoult
Duffy-Marie Arnoult (Photo: Courtesy Duffy-Marie Arnoult)
So far, we’ve focused on artists whose work has recently hung on gallery walls here, a commonality not applicable to the work of Duffy-Marie Arnoult. That’s in part due to her political activism with The Climate Reality Project, the Transit Equity Task Force, or other causes that eat up much of her time. Yet check her LinkedIn profile and you’ll see, listed second in her resume, that she’s been a photographer for Getty Images for more than 20 years.
It’s just one of her superpowers, and she gratefully acknowledges the mentors who helped along the way. “One of my influences has been my dad,” she says. “He always had cameras, and was always capturing moments. And also Karen Focht, who took a picture of me when I was in a play at Snowden, years before I actually met her. Then we realized it, and she became a local mentor to me. So I’ve had female mentors, but also male, like Henry Grossman. He photographed The Beatles and Pavarotti and all these incredible people, but I met him in the Time-Life photo lab, just wandering in there as a FIT [Fashion Institute of Technology] student.”
That chance meeting led to a lifelong friendship and ultimately her future work with a list of movie stars as long as your arm. Not many photographers of any gender can claim to have shot both Henry Kissinger and the Saturday Night Live afterparties. “I never started out thinking I would get into the entertainment industry, but it just sort of organically happened once I went to New York,” Arnoult reflects. Yet all those rarefied encounters pale before her time with not only a history-making icon, but a personal role model for Arnoult: the late Dr. Jane Goodall.
“My dad’s consulting agency, Arnoult & Associates, Inc., worked with her strategic planning, so he was part of the group that brought her to Memphis in 2009,” Arnoult recalls. “We had her to our home multiple times, and celebrated her 75th birthday with her here. We would drive around Memphis in my old college car, you know? And she would tell me stories from her girlhood, growing up in England. I look back at that and just feel so lucky. Not just to have had the time with her, but having that alignment of values and passion for the environment, to hear her speak about the power of the Mississippi River.”
For Arnoult, it marked a moment when she wanted to combine her photography skills with her broader concerns. “It really was pivotal to me, in how I looked at photography as a way we can connect to people and affect how we move in the world — and move together.” To that end, her most recent work has dovetailed with her political concerns, as when she recently visited Thailand to document the damage and loss of life after a tsunami there, or when she took personal portraits of human trafficking survivors for the local nonprofit Thistle & Bee.
“To be invited in,” she says of the latter work, “and be a witness, to be capturing and showing them the strength that they’ve regained through this program, I mean, it was an incredibly moving and empowering experience. And it reminded me why I love photography so much. I want to just be part of our creative community and be part of the good news coming out of Memphis, because there’s so much happening here and so much to be proud of.”