Across the United States, more than 900 streets bear the name Martin Luther King Jr. The photographer Susan Berger didn’t visit them all, but her series, “Martin Luther King Dr.,” captures an essential truth about these streets—their diversity.
Beginning in October of 2009, Berger began a pattern she’d repeat over the next year and a half. She’d pick an airport, then search on Google Earth for the Martin Luther King-named streets in the surrounding towns that she could reach in the time she allotted herself, usually about three weeks per region.
On her first trip, she boarded a flight from her current home of Tucson, Arizona, to Los Angeles, where she rented a car and drove out to Martin Luther King Boulevard, expecting, she says, to photograph people. [...]
Arizona, in 1992, was the last state to ratify Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a national holiday. It wasn’t until that day in 2016 that Tucson renamed its first street for the activist, in an “area that is totally undeveloped, has never been developed—it’s like this barren desert,” Berger says. She completed her series five years ago, but toyed with the idea of traveling out to photograph the street in Tucscon as an addendum. She hasn’t yet done so.
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