This striking book, which accompanies an exhibition at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, is the first dedicated to the legendary Hook Brothers Studio in Memphis, featuring photographs from 1912 to 1983.
 
Making Beauty: Hooks Brothers Studio, 1912-1983 seeks to offer a fuller, more nuanced portrait of the Black lived experience in Memphis and the surrounding region before, during, and after the civil rights movement. As the exhibition takes an extensive look at Memphis for nearly a century, the catalogue succinctly claims and encourages the right to beauty and self-expression, a kind of social freedom, among African Americans for empowerment, then and now. The book engages a new understanding of the urban South. It places Memphis’s Hooks Brothers Studio in conversation with James Van Der Zee’s GGG Studio in Harlem, and the Scurlock Studio in Washington, D.C.
 
Commissioned essays examine the studio’s role in shaping Memphis’s social and cultural landscape–from its musical legacy to its emergence as an epicenter of Black fashion and style–and consider the Hooks Brothers' focus on everyday life as a counter-image to Civil Rights–era documentary photography. It presents a wide range of photographic styles, including studio portraiture, documentary, advertising, and vernacular photographs, across glass plates, film negatives, and prints. The publication places their practice in dialogue with renowned photographers of the African Diaspora, including James Van Der Zee, Addison Scurlock, Seydou Keïta, and James Barnor. Making Beauty: Hooks Brothers Studio, 1912–1983celebrates the studio’s enduring legacy, its commitment to fostering kinship among Black Americans in the South, and the power of photography through a Black lens.