'It's hard to stop rebels that time travel' PART IV with Raymond Thompson Jr.
'It's hard to stop rebels that time travel' PART IV with Raymond Thompson Jr.
Join us via Zoom Wednesday, July 23rd, at 7 pm EDT
Can we bend time back on itself through image, text, and narrative? Photographer Raymond Thompson Jr. is aspiring to do just that. ‘It’s hard to stop rebels that time travel’ is Raymond’s re-memory project that stretches across a 240-year period of time beginning with the hidden worlds of borderland maroons living on the margins of plantations in the 18th century to present-day counties surrounding New Bern, North Carolina.
Over the last two year, Raymond has offered us a behind-the-scenes look at his unfolding process and photographic book project via periodic check-ins and updates. For part IV of this journey, Raymond will be sharing his newly released book by Void, an art-house publisher of photography books. This stunning and multi-layered book features archival fragments, historic ephemera and his own photographs to focus on previously concealed stories of slaves, maroons, and runaways. ‘It’s hard to stop rebels that time travel’ aims to expand narratives about the Black experience and connection to the ‘American’ landscape. The images are a combination of contemporary portraits, landscape photographs, archival runaway slave adverts annotated by the artist, extracts of Black folklore, and news articles reporting lynchings and maps.
Please join us as we celebrate Raymond’s new book.
In preparation for this talk, check out Raymond’s previous talks:
Raymond Thompson Jr. is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and visual journalist based in Austin, TX. He currently works as an Assistant Professor of Photojournalism at the University of Texas at Austin. He received an MFA in Photography from West Virginia University and a MA in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin. He also graduated from the University of Mary Washington with a BA in American Studies. He has worked as a freelance photographer for The New York Times, The Intercept, NBC News, NPR, Politico, ProPublica, The Nature Conservancy, ACLU, WBEZ, Google, Merrell, and the Associated Press and was selected as one of the top 50 photographers for Critical Mass 2022.
Raymond Thompson Jr.
Raymond Thompson Jr.
Raymond Thompson Jr.