Time Travel, Resistance, and Ghosts in the Landscape: Raymond Thompson Jr.’s Photobook About Maroon Histories
Welcome to this edition of [book spotlight]. Today, we uncover the layers of 'It’s hard to stop rebels that time travel,' by Raymond Thompson Jr (published by Void). We'd love to read your comments below about these insights and ideas behind the artist's work.
Some stories are too powerful to stay buried.
Raymond Thompson Jr.’s project It’s Hard to Stop Rebels That Time Travel brings hidden histories back into view: stories of maroons, runaway slaves, and lives erased from the American record. He mixes his own photographs with archival fragments, old maps, newspaper ads, and historical documents to rebuild what has been lost. His focus is on what the archive overlooks and how photography can fill in the gaps. The result is both personal and political.
Thompson’s book doesn’t try to give clear answers.
Instead, it raises important questions about freedom, erasure, and what it means to remember. Many of the figures in his images are hidden, turned away, or almost swallowed by darkness. That’s not by accident. It’s part of the message. It’s Hard to Stop Rebels That Time Travel is about seeing what was never meant to be seen and refusing to forget.
The Book
It’s Hard to Stop Rebels That Time Travel is a photographic project by Raymond Thompson Jr. that brings together original images, annotated archival materials, historical ephemera, and text to explore the often-erased histories of maroons-enslaved people who escaped and formed independent communities in the American South. Focusing on the region surrounding New Bern, North Carolina, Thompson reimagines these hidden stories through a mix of visual strategies that emphasize darkness, absence, and fragmentation. The book challenges traditional ideas of historical evidence and documentary photography by embracing uncertainty, myth, and memory. At its core, the project is a search for the environmental imagination and survival practices of Black people in unrecorded spaces. (Void)
Overview of the project: What inspired you to embark on It’s Hard to Stop Rebels That Time Travel, and how did the concept evolve over time?
“It’s Hard to Stop Rebels That Time Travel” is a photography project that utilises archival fragments, historic ephemera, and my own images to focus on individual stories of slaves, maroons, and runaways whose existence is only now revealed through traces in the collective archive. This project works to expand narratives about the Black experience and our connection to the “American” landscape. This work has been guided by local historic archives of runaway slave ads, lynching news articles, Black folklore, and other location-specific historical events.
For those who don’t know, Maroons were enslaved people who had escaped their captors but did not flee to the North. Instead, they chose to create a life in hard-to-access swamps or in the wild spaces between plantations. The survival strategies and techniques the Maroons used to survive in the ungoverned space between plantations can be thought of as “freedom practices.” Through these recently reclaimed threads of stories, we can begin to radically re-envision Black people’s connection to the American landscape.
This project starts in the hidden world of the southern borderland of the US and gives voice to Maroons who lived in the margins of plantations in the 18th century, and reaches across time to present-day counties surrounding New Bern, NC, established in 1710. Historically, the port city of New Bern's location on the coast made it a hub for the historic trade of human beings. This region, rich with important historical moments, is extremely relevant as one of the earliest colonised spaces in the United States.
The concept for the project began as a personal exploration of my family's histories within these landscapes. This angle proved to be challenging to pursue because much of my family’s records don’t exist. Much of what we know is based on oral history passed down from one generation to the next. As I worked on this project, the constraints I faced forced me to deviate from my original approach, and I began to look more broadly at the larger story, focusing on the environmental imagination of Black people in the US Southern landscape.
Exploring maroon communities: Your work delves into the lives of maroons—escaped slaves who formed independent communities. How did you approach researching and representing these often-overlooked histories?
The problem with researching maroons is that there is very little information in the archive about them. They are ghosts that we can only trace through fragment bits of information on the edges of history. I have been fascinated by the very existence of maroons. I first heard of them from stories about the maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia. Enslaved people would escape and flee into the swamp—their captors were often too afraid to go into the swamps to find them. There is minimal trace of maroons in the American landscape. I had to rely on the traces found in archives and historical books. I primarily used maps, runaway slave ads, lynching articles, and other accounts from period newspapers. The problem with this material was that it was often written by the dominant culture, which subjected the people forced into maroonage to be free.
As you worked with such absences, did you ever feel a tension between honouring their invisibility and making them visible through your photographs? How did you navigate that line?
Even though I have some connection to this landscape in North Carolina, I still felt like a stranger in this place. I also ask myself, what right did I have even to try to tell this story? By this point, I had moved beyond just my family's ties to this place and branched out to tell the stories of other Black people's ancestors in this community.
So, yes, there was a tension between honouring their invisibility and making them visible through a photograph. I addressed this in my work by being very intentional about how I use the human figure. I accomplished this by darkening the images to obscure faces, or I would photograph figures from behind to add a bit of anonymity to the subject.
Interweaving archives and imagery: The project combines archival fragments, historic ephemera, and your own photographs. How do you balance these elements to create a cohesive narrative?
The material informed my approach to the project in multiple ways. The material functioned primarily as research. I would use the information it contained to help me decide which locations in this three-county region I was working in.
I also approached the runaway slave ads by adding my annotations directly on top of the works. I did this to open up the meaning that lay behind the work and to challenge this historical authority that we give to archival materials written by people who owned enslaved people.
I don’t think that my work ever really achieves a balance. I want the work to feel out of balance and to challenge the traditional Western reading practices of the audience. The book does this by mixing colour photographs with black and white photographs, text, maps, and very dark portraits.
Was there a particular sequence or juxtaposition in the book that became a turning point for you something that crystallised your vision of how these disparate materials could speak to each other?
The first page of the book features a short section of text that is a poem I wrote, which sums up the collective weight of the words, images, and archival material in the book. The following two images that begin the first sequences of the book show a black-and-white figure hidden at the edge of the woods, followed by a colour photograph of a roadside creek. I travelled to that area to photograph an unmarked lynching site. This picture was one of the first I made for this project, which led me to search for portals in the landscape. That theme flows throughout the book.
Personal connection to New Bern: Given your familial ties to New Bern, North Carolina, how did this personal history influence your exploration of the region’s past and present?
When I first started working on the project, I spent much time looking for family grave sites. I was hoping to find more direct familial connections to the landscape. While I was visiting a Black cemetery in Trenton, NC, I came across a book left for visitors in a case. In the book, it mentions that if you were Black and died in the region, you would only be formally buried in the ground if you had money or belonged to a church. If you lived outside these social connections, your body would be deposited in the river or left out in nature to decompose. From that moment, I read those words, my understanding of this landscape shifted. I knew that my ancestors’ blood ran through this landscape. I came to believe that my very presence in the landscape today was a way of honouring them.
Advice for photographers engaging with archives: What guidance would you offer to photographers looking to incorporate archival materials into their work, especially when addressing complex historical subjects?
My advice to other photographers working with archives is to question everything. You have to look at the archival material from all sides. Who was the author, what was the original purpose, who was the original audience, and who paid for its production? This is only a short list; there are many more questions we could direct at the archive when using it to make new works.
Concept of ‘freedom practices’: You reference ‘freedom practices’ employed by maroons to survive in ungoverned spaces. How do these practices inform the themes and visuals in your project?
Maroon freedom practices can be very practical. For example, it included how to acquire information, food, a place to hide, or most importantly, how to avoid the patrolman and their dogs. On the other hand, there are also spiritual practices that can be traced in religious practices and folktales. These stories are filled with the tales of magical transformation and the ability of runaways to change form to hide or flee their enslavers. I took inspiration from this idea and began to explore the landscape for the magical portals and pathways my ancestors might have taken.
Temporal fluidity in storytelling: The notion of time travel suggests a non-linear narrative. How do you convey the fluidity of time and its impact on memory and identity through your photographs?
I know it's a cliché, but I think the timeless nature of black and white photographs does a lot of the heavy lifting in creating narrative dissonance in the work. Working with dark imagery disrupts the way we expect to view photography in our hyper-Western visual culture.
The dark landscapes strip away elements of time and linearity. The portraits in the project are almost too dark to read. This darkness might cause the viewer to fluctuate between reading them as portraits or as another landscape. I want the viewer of the work to have to work hard and look deeply at the portraits, veiled in a cloak of darkness.
Has this visual approach changed how you think about photography as a historical tool? Do you see it more as a way to raise questions than provide evidence?
In the past six years, I have been working with philosopher Édouard Glissant’s notions of “opacity” in photography.
In his writing, he claimed a space for the rights of minorities not to be defined by others’ definitions and the right to be misunderstood if they wanted. He points to the pressure in visual culture that everything is illuminated and easily explained.
Glissant’s ideas have caused me to rethink the role of photography in Black life and its effectiveness as a historical tool. This was a shock to me, especially coming from my training as a photojournalist. So now I’m cautious about how I use Black figures in my work. I believe that in the photojournalism and documentary tradition, photography has played a role in limiting the possibilities of Black life. I am interested in creating work that expands those possibilities rather than chokes them off.
Challenges in visualizing the unseen: Representing histories that lack extensive visual records can be challenging. What strategies did you employ to visualise the lives and environments of maroon communities?
The power and weight of this project is in the combination of all the materials. The landscapes, the portraits, the lynching articles, the runaway slave ads, and the maps. All these materials are in conversation with each other. A viewer of this work can pick and choose at what point to enter this visual collage. I used brief text to create the context for this work. Then I let the ebb and flow of the images: landscape, portrait, landscape, portal, face, text, map, create a world for the viewer to step into.
We will never really know these maroon communities factually. Their stories and experiences exist outside the realms of recorded Western history. This is where Saidiya Hartman’s idea of “critical fabulation” helps create a methodology for approaching stories that lack any visual trace.
Impact and reception: What do you hope viewers take away from It’s Hard to Stop Rebels That Time Travel, and how do you envision its role in broader conversations about history and identity?
I hope that the next time a viewer encounters a runaway slave ad or visits the Southern United States, they will see that these landscapes are richly layered with meaning. This project is not just about the repression of a people. It is about how those people resisted on their terms, sought harmony with nature, and had a deep spiritual practice that helped them rise above their current circumstances, allowing them to take flight.
To discover more about this intriguing body of work and how you can acquire your own copy, you can find and purchase the book here. (Void)
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