Richard Hay Jr. is a photographer who lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. He grew up in a suburb outside Washington, DC.
He studied photography at Northwestern University and earned a PhD in sociology there.
His work draws on sociology, architecture and design. He explores how people relate to the environments they create and inhabit.
At Northwestern he worked as a research assistant for a researcher who later moved to a university in Nigeria. The researcher invited him to visit, and he travelled to West Africa. Several years later he returned to Northern Nigeria to teach at a university there.
His book Resounding with Echoes: Sojourns across Africa and America was published by Kehrer Verlag in 2026. It brings together black-and-white and colour photographs he made in West Africa and the United States in the 1970s, with an essay by Emmanuel Iduma.
His work has been shown in group exhibitions at the Los Angeles Center of Photography and the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel.
