Raymond Thompson Jr returns to the landscape around New Bern, North Carolina, where his grandfather was born before leaving during the Great Migration. His inquiry reaches further back to maroons: people who escaped enslavement and built lives in swamps and other spaces beyond plantation control. In It’s Hard to Stop Rebels That Time Travel, this geography becomes a meeting place between family memory, archival evidence and the possibility of imagining freedom outside the terms imposed by slaveholders.
The book combines contemporary portraits and landscapes with runaway advertisements, Black folklore, reports of lynchings and maps. Thompson annotates the advertisements to recover something of the individuals obscured by their classification as property. His closely cropped, deliberately dark portraits draw on Édouard Glissant’s concept of opacity: the right to resist being made entirely legible to another person’s gaze. In the landscapes, doors, windows and patches of light suggest passages between times. Some locations are identified in historical records; others offer space for imagining how ancestors might have moved through the region.
Thompson’s work as an interdisciplinary artist and visual journalist is significant to this combination. Photography does not simply illustrate a recovered history; it tests how an archive can be approached when its surviving documents were created by people exercising power over their subjects. The present-day images introduce encounters and relationships that those documents cannot supply. An old map of North Carolina closes the sequence, returning its speculative journeys to a specific terrain.
Published by Void, the 112-page book uses five-colour printing and a debossed hardcover. João Linneu and Myrto Steirou shaped its editing and design; the compact rectangular format evokes a field notebook or travel guide. It won the Independent category of the 2025 Lucie Photo Book Prize. For collectors, its distinctive contribution is the relationship between archival intervention and contemporary portraiture: a book in which the manner of looking is inseparable from the question of whose account of history survives.
