Photographs and text by Raymond Thompson Jr.

Google “white people in trees.” This search term calls up photographs of tree climbers, hammocks and other romantic sublime images of non-minorities enjoying the outdoors. Now Google “black people in trees.” The first page of the search results show photographs of lynchings and other racially charged imagery. The contrast is telling.

This project is the first step in my examination of the relationship between African Americans and nature.

America’s social and cultural history of slavery, Jim Crow and mass incarceration has ignored and demonized black connection to the natural environment. The tree as a powerful cultural symbol in American memory has dual meaning. One meaning lies deep in the heart of American cultural identity, which is held in our vast preserved natural spaces. The other meaning lies at the heart of white supremacy and the historical memory of lynching.

These acts of racial terrorism not only served to reinforce white supremacy as the dominant social order in the Jim Crow South, but it did something more. For African Americans, these acts of violence became a warning that the woods, the trees, and the rivers represented sites of potential racial violence.

My aesthetic choices — black and white photography with strobe lighting — were influenced by historical lynching images. But I wanted the similarities to end at the aesthetic level. I produced this work to serve as a visual counterweight to images of racial environmental terrorism that are associated with and internalized by African Americans. I also hope my work reclaims a bit of the romantic sublime that is also a strong part of a pre-Reconstruction black culture identity.

As an African-American artist, I believe that in order for minorities to imagine the natural environment as a safe space, they need to see images of other black and brown people safely navigating that space. This body of work could be an invitation for healing the deep psychological scars inflicted by lynching.

My work is meant to be the antithesis of this shared historical memory. Deconstructing colonial optics of African Americans is the first step in building an “oppositional black aesthetic.” It can be a place where the imaged self and the imagined self are given space to breathe within the American landscape.

For more of Raymond’s work, visit his website.