Picturing Others with Tom Rankin, Rob Amberg, Rebecca Kiger, Raymond Thompson Jr. & Rich-Joseph Facun
Rob Amberg
Raymond Thompson Jr.
Rich-Joesph Facun
Wednesday, January 27th, 7 PM EST
What is the photographer's responsibility to the communities where they photograph? Tom Rankin, Professor of the Practice of Art and Documentary Studies at Duke will be hosting an in-depth conversation with Appalachian photographers Raymond Thompson Jr., Rebecca Kiger, Rob Amberg, and Rich-Joseph Facun. Together we will be questioning the role of insiders and outsiders when picturing others and how that impacts the boundary between what is shared and what is withheld. We will also be pondering the camera as an empathic tool and/or weapon for interrogating injustice.
In preparation for this talk, we have created a resource list of reading materials and photographers of interest. This is a community document so please feel free to add additional resources to the list.
This will be a two-part conversation. Join us again on Feb 3rd, co-hosted by Susan Patrice, we will be exploring the photographer’s responsibility to the communities they photograph when working with curators and photo editors.
Tom Rankin is Professor of the Practice of Art and Documentary Studies at Duke University where he directs the MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts. For 15 years he was director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke. His books include Sacred Space: Photographs from the Mississippi Delta (1993), which received the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Photography; Deaf Maggie Lee Sayre: Photographs of a River Life (1995); Faulkner's World: The Photographs of Martin J. Dain (1997); and Local Heroes Changing America: Indivisible (2000).
Rich-Joseph Facun is a photographer of Indigenous Mexican and Filipino descent. His work aims to offer an authentic look into endangered, bygone, and fringe cultures—those transitions in time where places fade but people persist. Before finding “home”in the Appalachian Foothills of southeast Ohio, Facun roamed the globe for 15 years working as a photojournalist. Facun’s work has been recognized by Photolucida’s Critical Mass, CNN, The Washington Post, Feature Shoot, The Image Deconstructed, The Photo Brigade, Looking At Appalachia, and Pictures of the Year International. Currently, he is finalizing the details of his monograph Black Diamonds, to be published by Fall Line Press in early 2021. The work is a visual exploration of place, community, and cultural identity in former coal mining boom towns of SE Ohio.
Rebecca Kiger is an independent photographer and educator based in West Virginia. She has been published in the NYT, Vox, and Time. She is approaching her third year as an artist-in-residence for the Rural Arts Collaborative and more recently the Ohio Arts Council. Through these residencies, she teaches photography in under-resourced high schools in the Ohio Valley with the social justice goal of supporting new voices in photography. Rebecca has contributed stills to a variety of documentary films about Appalachia, including the Oscar-nominated Heroin(e), Recovery Boys, Roll Red Roll, and Her Appalachia, an addendum project to the documentary film Hillbilly. She is currently working on a documentary project about the loss of mental health resources in her community and the impact of this on the most vulnerable. Finally, she has been working several years on a long-form documentary project about her family's life in Appalachia and its connection to intergenerational trauma and family narrative.
Rob Amberg moved to Madison County, North Carolina, in 1973 and began what has become his lifetime project – writing and photographing about the evolving culture and environment of his adopted county. His first book, Sodom Laurel Album, was published in 2002 by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke and the University of North Carolina Press. His second book from Madison County, The New Road: I-26 and the Footprints of Progress in Appalachia, was published in 2009 by the Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago. To complete the trilogy, a third book, tentatively titled Little Worlds, is in progress.
Raymond Thompson Jr. Raymond is a freelance photographer and multimedia producer based in Morgantown, WV. He currently works as a Multimedia Producer at West Virginia University and with the WVU Center for Resilient Communities. He is also pursuing an MFA in photography from West Virginia University. He received his Masters degree from the University of Texas at Austin in journalism and 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, ProPublica, WBEZ, Google, Merrell, and the Associated Press. Raymond was the 2020 Lenscratch 1st place student prize winner.