Photographer Reimagines The Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster – West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Hawks Nest Tunnel is a landmark in West Virginia — a place in Fayette County, West Virginia, where much of the New River is diverted through a mountain to generate hydropower before it rejoins the river near Gauley Bridge. It’s also the site of a historic workplace disaster. 

The site and its legacy now are the subject of a new photography book. It’s titled Appalachian Ghost: A Photographic Reimagining of the Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster. It features the photos of Raymond Thompson Jr., an artist, educator, and journalist now based in Austin, Texas. Inside Appalachia host Mason Adams reached out to Thompson to learn more.

Adams: So your book is Appalachian Ghost: A Photographic Reimagining of the Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster. It was published this spring. For those unfamiliar, can you describe Hawk’s Nest tunnel and what happened there?

Thompson: In West Virginia in the 1930s, there was a construction project to divert the New River, and in that project, they were building a dam to divert the river, and they also were building a powerhouse roughly three-and-a-half miles downstream, and they also were building a tunnel to connect the dam in a powerhouse. To do that, they needed to dig through a mountainside, essentially. While they were digging through the mountainside, they came across a portion of silica rock. Because they were using improper drilling techniques, using dry drills like rock filled with silica, it kicked up a lot of silica dust, and many of the men working in a tunnel would have contracted silicosis. Silicosis, once it gets into your lungs, pretty much just destroys your lungs and you slowly suffocate. It’s thought that roughly there are 5,000 workers in total who worked on the project, and roughly 3,000 of those workers are actually working underground and in the tunnel. A demographer has put the number of potential workers who have died roughly around 764 people, which would make the Hawks Nest disaster one of the worst disasters in US history.

Adams: How did you first become aware of the story of these workers who excavated Hawks Nest tunnel?

Thompson: I was working at West Virginia University for their alumni magazine, and we would often get books from West Virginia University Press to review. My coworker brought me a copy of Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, with this intro essay by Catherine Venable Moore. I got to it and began to read it, and I was super fascinated by the story. One thing I forgot to add earlier was that of those 3000 workers, roughly two thirds of the men who worked in the tunnel were African American. When I got this book from my coworker, I was reading Catherine’s essay. I was reading Muriel Rukeyer’s work, which is really fascinating. It’s a book of poetry, but I always think of Muriel Rukeyser as a journalist poet. She went into the field and reported like a reporter would for a typical written piece. Instead of just producing articles, she produced this book of poetry about what happened in the place that, combined with Catherine Venable Moore’s really beautiful essay about navigating the space, just captured my imagination. Maybe a year or a year-and-a-half after that I actually got to meet Katherine and get a tour of Hawks Nest locations, which really, really hooked me to this story. I knew that I wanted to do something to talk about what happened in this space.

Adams: It’s kind of wild. This huge industrial disaster, which is what it is when you look at it from this distance, is forgotten in a lot of circles, but you can see this chain of how the memory has been kept alive, from Muriel Rukeyser collecting poems about some of the tragedy’s victims and how it’s affecting the families in The Book of the Dead,” to Catherine Venable Moore’s further work going there and matching the poems to the area, to now your photography. How does that feel, to build on that chain of work and give more attention to this tragedy that’s been forgotten by so many people? 

Thompson: I was totally building on the people who came before me in this work. With my role, I was super fascinated by the visual archive that was surrounding Hawks Nest. I found that when I began just to do a little bit of research into what visually existed around Hawks Nest, and oftentimes I couldn’t find African Americans represented in stories that were out there. I was super curious, like, ‘Where are they in these spaces?” In the visual archive itself, you can see little glimpses, little threads of their existence in the space. I knew that I wanted to start from this point, right? But also, at the same time, this is the beautiful thing about storytelling. It’s a beautiful thing about photography, about arts, about journalism, that it’s all cumulative. We’re all building on each other. None of us is this in vacuums. It takes more than one brick to build a house or wall, you know? And I feel like my project is one brick, along with Catherine’s brick, along with Muriel Rukeyer’s brick, and hopefully many others after me who might take up the story. The book itself is, I call it a “speculative archive,” but like a speculative visual archive. It’s this combination of images that I’ve made,  images that I’ve constructed, images that I just found through direct observation of looking at the landscape around Hawks Nest, archival images from the archive, and it’s filled with writing: a couple poems and a lot of historical details about the Hawks Nest tunnel. It almost feels like a collage experience, in some ways, but I feel like this is another way for us to open up what’s possible in our understanding of history, understanding of West Virginia and understanding of Appalachia.

Adams: One thing that just strikes me when I consider your book and Murial Rukeyser’s work is the value of art, not only in helping people process what happened, but in documenting it and tracking the landscape and the human impact outside of official company records.

Thompson: Yeah. Archival records are interesting things, because we often look at them as these primary source documents, as truth in a way, that come from history. But we always have to remember that each archival record was made with a purpose, made by a person behind a record who had a point of view. And if we don’t know what that point of view is, then we have to be very careful with those records when looking at them. Art is one of the ways to look at these records and try to both see the truth of who made it, but then also realize it’s a double-edged sword. It was made for a purpose, but then it could be reused to tell a different story.

Adams: I want to quote a line from Anita Jones Cecil, who’s the granddaughter in one of the families that was involved. This is from Catherine’s essay. Anita says, “”they actively sought people who were poor, who were desperate and uneducated, and shipped them up here. Expendable people. People that nobody would miss.” And that was a descendant of a family of white workers who still received roughly twice as much money as the black workers did. I appreciate photographers for your eyes and what you can see and capture that a lot of us don’t see. So as a photographer and a human being, when you look back on this tragedy, what do you see? 

Thompson: It’s an interesting question, because I think almost naturally, we tend to want to focus on the negative. We know a number of lives lost. We know the extraction from the landscape and how the landscape has been changed. We can see the violence. If you’ve ever traveled in that area around Hawks Nest State Park, you have a river and then you have these dries. All the water is gone, which creates another sort of recreational space, but it’s almost like a weird little scab on the earth where water should be. We have all this, the disaster that’s in our face all the time, and the violence that’s in the landscape. For my method and how I’m working, I need to recognize that and embrace that violence in the landscape, but then also find the light. And for me, that light came in just interacting with these archival records, finding these threads of these African American men in the archive, popping them out through my artwork and my process, and taking a picture that initially was meant to document an industrial process — it was never about the people — and popping those men out and making that image about them again so we could remember who they are. And in those images, you can see lives. You can see desires and needs in those images. So for me, that is the light of this. It’s where I find hope, is the that these just weren’t victims, they were people with full lives, and to learn how to look at people with this wider embrace,

Adams: This is emotionally heavy material. It’s hard to read these poems, and to read Catherine’s work and to look at these images, but this work required you to spend lengths of time immersed in that material, in that world. What wisdom do you take away from that work?

Thompson: We live in this super-digital age where we see things through other mediated experiences, whether it’s from the phone or even from a book. For me, it was the importance of actually showing up to the space, and then taking that quiet time to look at something out of our busy digital lives, to pay homage to a space and with these people on your mind. It feels almost religious or spiritual in a way. It’s a way of paying honor to what’s happened in these spaces, even though there’s nothing really in that landscape that points directly at that, or them or their presence, but almost taking time to sense it. It’s almost like an honoring of the ancestors in a way. I think it’s important in our busy digital lives, to slow down and make time to do that.

Adams: What are you working on now? How did this experience change the shape of how you view your photography?

Thompson: Working on Appalachian Ghost required me to use archives in creative ways, to use archives as threads to create a new work. I’m currently applying that technique now, just in a different place. I’m wrapping up a project in North Carolina, where I again use archival records. That’s visual records like archival runaway slave ads, and using the information in those runaway slave ads, and visiting the locations that are mentioned in the ads. When I was working on Appalachian Ghosts, I was looking for ghosts in the landscape. And I’m doing it again in North Carolina — this time using runaway slave ads as my reference and trying to learn how to look at the landscape through their eyes. That project is called, “It’s hard to stop rebels that time travel.” So again, it’s this revisiting of a landscape that has a really, really hard history. One thing that’s different this time is that my family has roots in these locations that I’m working currently. So I did take a much more personal look at the archive in a space where I have blood connections to the land.