



1 / 14 Chevron Chevron Photograph by Philip Montgomery Demonstrators in the streets of Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray. Baltimore, Maryland, May 1, 2015.

Americans have, at this juncture in our history, become accustomed to conducting our most painful reckonings in public. The balcony of the Lorraine Motel, Dealey Plaza, the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel, and a forsaken driveway in Mississippi occupy a profane corner in the minds of a generation of Americans. Yet the geography of conflict extends well beyond the locales where Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Medgar Evers perished. There are lesser-known addresses: the street corner where residents are routinely stopped and frisked, the side of the road where a driver is detained for a minor violation. These are the less visible conflicts that cumulatively become something volatile. Fifty years ago this week, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, a piece of legislation that was hailed as a hallmark of racial progress. Five days later, a police traffic stop in Watts, California, detonated five days of riots that left thirty-four dead and cleaved the city’s history into the era before the fires and the years that succeeded it.

The theatre of revolt that was staged in the streets of Watts became a redundant feature of the period, with successive explosions taking place in many other American cities before the end of the decade. That history, despite whatever efforts were made, has not been interred in the past.

The photographer Philip Montgomery was born in 1988, twenty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King and the wake of fire that his death brought about. Yet Montgomery’s images convey an elemental historical quality—familiar in the way of the angry imagery from Watts, Newark, Harlem, Detroit, and the other flammable precincts of the late sixties. These new photos capture recent events in Baltimore, Maryland, in Ferguson, Missouri, and in Newark, New Jersey, where Montgomery shadowed police officers in order to study the department’s use of stop-and-frisk. But his images from these three cities feel interchangeable, not just geographically but temporally as well. Canfield Drive in Ferguson and Presbury Street in Baltimore are reference points in a much longer lineage. (That we could easily add Sanford, Florida, Cleveland, Ohio, Charleston and North Charleston, South Carolina, and Staten Island, New York, to this list of racial flash points establishes just how redundant this phenomenon is.)

Montgomery’s photographs capture the humanity of people for whom this lineage is not an abstract concern. There’s a woman, palm to the sky, anguish etched in her features. We know nothing of what happened immediately before that moment, but we’re tragically familiar with what she’s gone through. A young man stands in the middle of the street during a storm, his gaze focussed somewhere far behind the lens. What fear animates the expression he wears? Here is a different man who has been stopped, but “frisk” is the grossest of misnomers for what is being done to him. These are not disjointed moments bound by a single artist’s perspective. These are stations in an American crucible.

Photographs from Baltimore were shot for The New Yorker. Photographs from Newark were shot for The Atlantic.