A shuttered mine...Eastern Kentucky, 1965

Here's another shot from my efforts to document living and working

conditions in the impoverished coal-mining region of Eastern Kentucky

in the 1960s. This was one of many closed mines in Kentucky's

Cumberland Mountains. Your comments and critiques are always welcome.

Thanks...Bill

You might like the photography exhibit "Coal Hollow", which is touring around the East Coast right now. It features a number of solid photographs of this same subject matter.

 

I think you've established a strong sense of place here and the person in the photograph really adds a feeling of reality. The road creates a good sense of depth as well, which also adds to the feeling of reality in this photograph.

 

If you don't mind a bit of technical criticism, I think that this would be stronger if there were more details in the buildings, and if the sky were not burned out. I would suggest exposing for a longer amount of time and developing for less, or using a compensating developer, either one of which would expand the tonal range. With better tonal separation in the buildings there would be more detail and with it more of a sense of the condition of the buildings.

 

- Randy

Thanks, Randy--I'll check out that exhibit. Actually, this posting was made with a 40-year-old print that was a bit faded and discolored. I lost some of the detail in the photoshop salvage effort.

Bill,

 

There is a book that goes along with the exhibit that's worth looking into. The reproduction quality is fairly good too.

 

Are these from your own youth or are they familiy photos from a previous generation? They remind me of some of the photographs my mother collected when she was young. They lived in West Virginia in a coal town that had no road, the only way in or out was the train, unless you walked the tracks to the nearest non-company town.

 

- Randy

This is a powerful, emotive set of pictures! Were they published?

 

I, too, look at these and wonder what courses their lives took in the years since then. I know a couple of guys went to Alabama and did a book on the people and their families who were described and photographed in "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men". The pictures they took were interesting, but didn't have the impact of Walker Evans' shots.

superb!

Randy, thanks for your comments. The town where your mother lived in West Virginia sounds much like the hamlets and hollows I visited in Eastern Kentucky on my five reporting trips there during the early and mid-1960s.

 

And thank you, Doug, for your kind words. At the time of my Eastern Kentucky project, I was working in Philadelphia as a news correspondent and photojournalist for an assortment of publications and agencies. The images ran in a number of newspapers and magazines, and several national church organizations also used the pictures in their anti-poverty campaigns.

 

For a good overview of the desperate living and working conditions in Eastern Kentucky in the early 1960s, read "Night Comes to the Cumberlands," by the late Harry M. Caudill, a lawyer and state legislator who lived in Whitesburg, Letcher County. Caudill's book ranks with Michael Harrington's "The Other America" in helping to spur Lyndon B. Johnson's "Great Society" anti-poverty effort.

 

Thanks again for your interest. Cheers...Bill

 

 

 

 

I'll second the "Night" recommendation. I think I have two copies in my personal library...

 

- Randy

I love the idea and the execution. Simple and beautiful.