Raymond Thompson Jr.: On speculation

In this episode, we talk with Raymond Thompson on speculation. He talks about how his portfolio represents the many different disciplines and approaches that inform his work. He discusses his role as a photographer in understanding himself within history, and the challenges of working with archives that are often incomplete. Raymond formulates his idea of speculation in photography, as a way of filling in the gaps when facts are no longer effective.

What does photography ethics mean to Raymond? 

“So much. The one way is ethics should be the operational code of how to engage...the subject-photographer relationship... So it’s really that negotiation between that relationship between photographer and the person being photographed. And that’s an important relationship to work through. The other part for me is visual ethics, or the right to be seen or not to be seen or representational ideas. I think about that a lot, especially about gaze–the male gaze, white gaze, Black gaze, and how we look. That’s how I look at ethics mostly, through that lens, or the idea of who’s doing the looking?” (44:15)