Open for business. Anticipating visitors. A place to lay your troubles down. And yet, fewer souls are bearing their burdens in Black bars in Black neighborhoods across the country. What remains isn’t life; it’s the imprint of it. These powerful narratives are on display in a powerful group of documentary photographs from L. Kasimu Harris that have recently been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
In “Mr. Victor’s Routine: Open Door. Turn on TV. Jerry, Jerry! (The Other Place),” viewable at MoMA’s website, Harris captures something harder to name than absence. The image doesn’t simply document a place; it holds onto what that place used to be. A watering hole reduced to a damp center, yet composed in a way that refuses to let the past disappear entirely. The life that once filled the room lingers in the frame, pressing quietly against its present stillness.
Harris, a New Orleans-born photographer and writer, has built a career on that tension. His series “Vanishing Black Bars & Lounges,” now part of the permanent collection at MoMA, traces the slow erosion of spaces that once functioned as more than just places to gather. They were anchors, sites of connection, exchange, and recognition.
“These spaces at one point had a civic value,” Harris said. “You could meet with the DA or the mayor. You might not have had a country club, but you could go to this space, be respected, and make business happen in a relaxing environment. It was that third space where you could talk to your neighbor, or someone from another part of the city could come in.”
Photos courtesy of L. Kasimu Harris
Issac “Ike” Dixon, left, is the longtime proprietor of Purple Rain Bar. He owns three properties, including the bar and they’re currently listed on the real estate market. This bar is home to the Golden Blades Indians, who dress there on Mardi Day and St. Joseph’s Night. “The Monday Faithfuls” 2019 
Zell’s Corner 
Inside Black Bars for the Zulu second-line 
Originally Named Joe’s Sandpiper Lounge, it is a venerable waterhole that has been in existence about 60 years. His nephew renamed it Benny’s Sandpiper Lounge and has run it for 30 years. The neon sign was placed on the building for a scene in Ray, the 2004 biopic about Ray Charles. Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand is the song Jamie Foxx (Charles) performing during the scene at the Sandpiper Lounge “Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand,” 2019
What Harris documents is not just disappearance, but displacement of function, of memory, and of access. In the absence of formal institutions built for and by Black communities, third spaces like bars carried a different kind of weight. They were informal, but essential. Now, the infrastructure they quietly upheld is fading along with them.
Harris’ work as a writer shines through in his photography. Each click of his camera captures a narrative.
“You have an entryway to a memory that’s already within you, and you connect to it,” he said. “And that’s like the ladder of abstraction that you just hope people get. You hope that it’s work that people allow into their hearts.”
Each frame captures pain, longing, amnesia, delusion, rejection — a waning. Each image feels like the manifestation of a last gap, a space suspended between what was and what remains. That tension carries into “Come Tuesday (Marwan Pleasant at Sportsman’s Corner),” the most colorful of the works now housed at MoMA. At first glance, it reads as a celebration, community, light, and presence. But the longer the viewer sits with it, the more the image resists that simplicity. When I see the pleading on the face of the subject, the perceived celebration begins to feel closer to a celebration of life. The past is not gone, but it is being carried, unevenly, into the present. Our minds drift to what was and the grief that accompanies us as we step into what will be.
This year, Harris became the first Black, New Orleans-based photographer to have work added to MoMA’s permanent collection, an achievement that places him among artists whose names have long defined the institution’s walls.
“I’m in the same permanent collection as Van Gogh, Basquiat, and Picasso. Full stop,” he said.
Still, the recognition does not appear to have altered the work itself, although it has extended his reach.
“I’m still the same person. The difference is — it’s validation,” said Harris. “When a museum acquires your work, it’s evidence of what they believed was important at that moment.”
The images remain grounded in the same intention: to document, to remember, and, perhaps most importantly, to leave something behind that others can still enter. Not to explain what has been lost. But to make sure it can still be felt.
While the exhibit that launched the acquisition has concluded, you can find out more at moma.org.