Unsurprisingly, then, it wasn’t long before the moral clarity offered by photographs became considerably less clear as politicians discovered the manipulative power of the medium when its goal is manipulation. The beauty of the resulting images by Theodore Lilienthal obscures the dark reality of postwar life for Black Southerners. And yet the most affecting photographs in “A Long Arc” are not — or at least are not merely — visual records of exploitation. The most powerful images capture the beauty and the tenderness and the self-possession of people who are living out their lives mostly invisible to the rest of the world. Or of the ramifications of an unresolved history still unspooling in this history-haunted part of the country.

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Persons: Theodore Lilienthal, Charles Street, Brian Piper Organizations: Southerners, Charles Exchange, New Orleans Museum of Art Locations: New Orleans, St, America