Tell it on the mountain
A powerful new book of photos and oral histories documents the ravaged lives of West Virginia's coal miners.
By Sarah Karnasiewicz
Read more: Poverty, Photojournalism, Life
On Jan. 2, 2006, when an explosion at the Sago Mine in Tallmansville, W.Va., trapped 13 men underground, the news media flocked to the site. Suddenly the coal mining communities of Appalachia -- rural outposts that the rest of the country usually regards with a mix of romanticism and ridicule -- found themselves thrust into the national spotlight. And for that moment, as Americans held their breath for the miners, the public caught a glimpse of the men and women and mountains that for decades have fueled the coal economy -- an economy that despite its enormous human and environmental costs, still supplies 50 percent of the nation's power. The U.S. Energy Information Administration expects that figure will rise to 57 percent by the year 2030.
Released just one month after the Sago disaster, "Coal Hollow" -- a new book of photographic portraits and oral histories collected by Ken and Melanie Light -- takes readers where the network news cameras left off, deep into the hills of southern West Virginia. The result of five years' work and hundreds of miles of travel, "Coal Hollow" is a social documentary rooted in the tradition of Farm Security Administration photographers like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks. But instead of migrant mothers and Depression-era drifters, the Lights' subjects are heartbreakingly contemporary. Whether industry barons, retired miners, snake handlers, preachers or state Supreme Court justices, each of the men and women in the Lights' chronicle have lived their lives in the shadow of the free-market coal economy and watched it shape not only the topography of the hills around them, but also their families, their jobs and their towns.
In the introduction to "Coal Hollow," Melanie Light writes that the people of Appalachia have too long been treated like slag -- the waste that's left behind after the mining process is complete. Indeed, the evidence of decades of both corporate and environmental neglect litters Ken Light's luminous black-and-white images. It is in the creased and weary face of a mother hanging laundry, the skeletal, dust-streaked bodies of children at play, in three generations of families crowded atop sagging porches and inside rotting trailers. It is found in the black, blasted mountains and streams of raw sewage, and written on mossy tombstones and across the maimed hands of miners.
I spoke with the Lights by phone from their California home about globalization, the roots of the term "trailer trash," and why, despite the steep human costs, coal is still "king."
What drew you to this project?
Ken: I've had a long interest in photographing rural communities in America; in the past I'd done a book called "Delta Time," about rural Mississippi, and also a lot of work about immigrants and farmworkers coming into California over the Mexican border. But what drew me to West Virginia was that in 1999, when I began the project, the country was in a discussion about welfare reform. And at the same time as that conversation was happening, I began to see some statistics about West Virginia that pointed to it as a state with a lot of problems -- things like black lung disease, a high rate of people using smokeless tobacco, and in certain counties, very high suicide rates. I had photographed in West Virginia in the early '70s, because as a young student I had been to Buffalo Creek and photographed in the wake of the Buffalo Creek mine disaster. So it seemed like it might be a good site for telling an interesting story.
Did you find that people wanted to tell their stories?
Melanie: A lot of people, especially in the hollows, have felt so neglected at every level, that when someone comes to them and says, "Well, tell me what it's like to live here, and work or not work here," at first they are a little taken aback. They think, "Why does this person care about me?" But then they start telling their story, and as they tell it they actually become to value their own story because they realize that they have this very particular way of having lived in America, and it's something that nobody else has.
It's amazing to look at "Coal Hollow" and see so many similarities to work done in the 1930s by Walker Evans and James Agee and the FSA photographers. Most people, I think, tend to think of those Dust Bowl-era images as part of the past, but your photo of "Laura on laundry day" is an almost uncanny update of Dorothea Lange's famous migrant mother. Were you consciously trying to draw an allusion between the lives of the West Virginians and the Depression-era poor?
Ken: Well, I've been a photographer for 36 years and so I'm very conscious of the historical community of photographers that have gone out in America and documented similar subjects. So I don't set out to make a photograph that looks like Dorothea Lange's, but I think that those gestures and those faces are universal, and in fact the images that were made during that period were so powerful that they're really burnt into our brains.
A lot of people have made a comparison between the photo of Laura and the one by Dorothea Lange, which is obviously an incredible compliment. But I do believe that there is also an interesting twist in having pictures that look like they were taken in the 1930s and then having people realize that, in fact, they're modern -- they're from our time. Part of my interest as a photographer has been to make that connection and to show that there is a huge part of America that is really unseen and has gone largely unchanged, even generations after the Depression.
In your introduction you quote James Agee, who once said that there is something "obscene and terrifying" about people of privilege going into the lives of the underprivileged to pry out their stories. Going into the project did you fear your work would be seen as exploitative?
Melanie: I probably struggled with it more than Ken. I don't know that I ever felt I didn't have a right to be there, but I did feel that it was rather presumptuous of me. But the fact that we all partake in the use of these commodities -- particularly coal -- makes it so that we all really do have an obligation to understand exactly where they come from and how they work, from the very bottom of the supply chain all the way up to our table or car. And that idea was infinitely stronger than any of my self-absorbed questions about what my place was in people's lives.
Ken: I think for me, I've been in these communities for decades, so I know that I am privileged and I know that not only is it a great honor but also an incredible responsibility to be allowed into these worlds. People just open up their lives -- it's really quite remarkable -- they invite you into their houses, into their bedrooms, and they tell you their deepest secrets and their stories. They point to the holes in their ceilings and they ask you to take a picture because someone needs to help them. And, of course, partly with the privilege comes the ability to get that story out into the world. Because you have contacts and you can get a book published, it allows the information to get out. So with the privilege comes the responsibility of seeing that those stories are available not only for the present but also for future generations to witness.
