Tunnelitis #5, from the Appalachian Ghost, Tunnelitis series

Maker Thompson Jr., Raymond American, b. 1978

Date2019

MediumInkjet print

Dimensionspaper: 26 in x 32 in; image: 24 in x 30 in

Credit LineMuseum purchase with funds provided by the Maxine and Lawrence K. Snider Prize

Object number2021:65

Collections

Maxine and Lawrence K. Snider Prize

About the ArtistRaymond Thompson, Jr. is an artist, visual journalist, and educator whose work focuses on race, identity, and expanding narratives about the Black experience. He created his Appalachian Ghost series (2018-2019) to reveal a hidden history about the construction of a three-mile-long tunnel in Fayetteville, West Virginia, in the 1930s that exposed the nearly 800 workers—the majority of whom were Black—to pure silica dust and eventually led to their deaths. The series was inspired by the poem George Robinson: Blues from The Book of the Dead (1938) by Muriel Rukeyser:
As dark as I am. when I came out at morning after the tunnel at night
with a white man, nobody could have told which man was white.
The dust had covered us both, and the dust was white.
Thompson restages photographs he has found in archives, keeping the identities of his subjects intentionally obscured to highlight the workers who died without recognition. The resulting images convey the dark history of toxic mining practices and issues of environmental racism at large.

Conversely, for his Imaging/Imagining series (2017), Thompson portrays Black individuals submerged in nature. The images show quiet contemplation and joy, highlighting the natural world as essential to collective healing.
He works as an Assistant Professor of Photojournalism at the University of Texas at Austin, where he also completed an MA in Journalism (2012). Thompson also graduated from the University of Mary Washington with a BA in American Studies (2009) and received an MFA in Photography from West Virginia University (2021). He has shown work at Candela Gallery, Richmond, Virginia (2019) and Kennedy Height Art Center, Cincinnati, Ohio (2016) among others, and was the 2023 winner of the 1619 Aftermath Grant. He has been a freelance photographer for The New York Times, The Intercept, NBC News, NPR, Politico, Google, and others.