Appalachian Ghosts by Raymond Thompson Jr.

Issue 150

When you look out at the American landscape nothing is as it seems. Every tree, mountain, and river has stories to tell. One of my guiding questions has been “where am I in all this beauty?” I know that my roots run deep in the land, but there is a veil obscuring those stories making them nearly impossible to find. As a black artist, I’m sensitive to the ways the black body is subject to being both hyper- visible and invisible at the same time. These feelings moved with me as I navigated the rural spaces of Appalachia. I want to uncover the narratives about black people that have been forgotten or buried.

Using his training as a photojournalist and documentary photographer, Raymond Thompson Jr. addresses the exclusion of African American narratives from visual and historical archives. Appalachian Ghosts centers on the little-known disaster around the construction of the Hawks Nest Tunnel in West Virginia. During the construction process, hundreds of African American and other migrant laborers became infected with debilitating, and often deadly, respiratory issues from the mineral silica, which unearthed in large quantities during the mining process. Thompson Jr.’s images embody the suffocating disorientation of the worker’s experience, as white dust swirls and obscures laboring hands and bodies.

Raymond Thompson Jr. (he/him), formerly of Morgantown, WV, now lives and works in Austin, TX.
www.raymondthompsonjr.com | @raythompsonjrphoto

Images © Raymond Thompson Jr.