Picturing Others: Photographing in Appalachia - Part II
Roger May
Rob Amberg
Raymond Thompson Jr.
Rich-Joesph Facun
Wednesday, February 3rd, 7 PM EST
What is the photographer’s responsibility to the communities they photograph when working with curators and photo editors? Join us this week for part II of Picturing Others where we will be joined by Roger May and Appalachian photographers Raymond Thompson Jr., Rebecca Kiger, Rich-Joseph Facun, and Rob Amberg. We will also be pondering the camera as an empathic tool and/or weapon for interrogating injustice.
If you missed lasts week's talk you can watch a highlights reel introducing each photographer or the full-length conversation here.
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.
Roger May is an Appalachian American photographer and writer based in Alum Creek, West Virginia. He was born in the Tug River Valley on the West Virginia and Kentucky border, in the heart of Hatfield and McCoy country. His work explores the complicated history of place, faith, and identity in the coalfields. In 2014, he founded the crowdsourced Looking at Appalachia project. He lectures about his work and about the visual representation of Appalachia.
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. 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. 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.