In Black Diamonds, Rich-Joseph Facun turns his camera toward the Appalachian region he now calls home, approaching it not as an outsider’s emblem but as a lived community. Identifying as a person of color, Facun sets his understanding of the region against familiar external assumptions about race, religion, gender, and politics. The book’s subject is therefore both geographical and personal: rural foothills, coal-mining towns, poverty, work, hospitality, and the daily negotiations through which a place is known from within.

Facun’s photographs hold several temporal registers together. They suggest the afterlife of Appalachian coal towns, acknowledge the hyperreal strangeness of the present, and leave room for an uncertain future. Rather than turning the region’s difficulties into a political illustration, the work attends to ordinary survival and to the relationships that make life possible. Its seriousness lies in this shift of emphasis: Appalachia appears neither as stereotype nor as social problem alone, but as a complicated human environment shaped by memory, misrepresentation, endurance, and welcome.

Published by Fall Line Press in 2021, Black Diamonds is an English-language hardcover of 128 pages. For collectors of contemporary photobooks, its importance rests in the meeting of documentary attention and personal identification. Facun’s position complicates the standard visual narratives attached to Appalachia, while the book’s monographic form gives sustained attention to a region often represented through simplified cultural images. It is a considered record of place and belonging, and a distinctive contribution to photographic work about the American rural landscape.