Photographs Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

‘America’s Coal Miners’ Photography Exhibit Donated to W.Va. Art Collection

A photography project called “America’s Coal Miners” was recently donated to the West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History. The project includes life-size images of West Virginia coal miners in high quality photographs.

Photographer Thorney Lieberman has kept some of the images of coal miners in his own home in Charleston since 2007. Some hang on Lieberman’s walls and others even hang from the ceiling and among his coat rack.

Several life size photos hang in photographer Thorney Lieberman’s home in Charleston.

In 2007, two photographs won awards from the West Virginia Division of Arts Culture and History. The only image of a female coal miner in the project won a Merit Award. The subject of that image was Anita Cecil-McBride.

Lieberman says he’ll never forget the first time he met Cecil-McBride at a church in Boone County.

“She jumped out of her car and she was driving like a tiny little Geo Metro,” Thorney said, “ and across the windshield in huge letters, it said ‘COAL DIGGER.’ She jumped out in her mining clothes, filthy. And I was so stunned. I didn’t take a picture but it’s burned in my memory of her jumping out of this coal digger car, and ‘here I am!’”

Lieberman photographed Anita in those mining clothes for a black and white photo, put together with mosaic images.

Six pieces of Lieberman’s coal miner series are already on display for the public in Moundsville at the Grave Creek Mound Archaeological Complex.

While he can’t know how every person has reacted to the images, he’s aware of a certain group.

“Especially West Virginians,” he said. “Very proud to have seen them. It makes them proud to be West Virginians. It makes them proud of their culture.”

Thorney Lieberman has kept some photographs in his home in Charleston, WV. John Freeman was one of the first miners he photographed.

The photographs are life-size portraits from the tops of the miner’s helmets to the tips of their boots. Most of the portraits are shot in black and white and mounted on steel sheets. The final pieces are almost 7-feet tall.

The project was meant to “put a human face on energy.”

The exhibit was originally sponsored by some pro-industry groups such as coal companies and Appalachian Power along with the United Mine Workers of America, and private donors like the Greater Kanawha Valley Foundation.

Lieberman is not from “coal country.” Even when he moved to Charleston, he didn’t have much ties to the state’s coal fields. But he’s used to being an outsider to the subjects of his portraits. He photographed Native Americans in Colorado for 15 years.

“I’m very proud,” he said. “This kind of New Yorker, you know, came into West Virginia and was able to contribute.”

Initially, he was inspired to take the photos after watching the terror of the 2006 Sago Mine Disaster unfold, shortly after moving to West Virginia. Thirteen miners were trapped for two days underground in the Sago Mine Disaster. All but one eventually died.

The lifesize image of Coy and Corissa Daniels hangs in photographer Thorney Liebermans’ home by his coat rack.

“The explosion at the Sago mine happened and it was big in the news,” he said. “And it shocked me into realizing that I lived in the middle of, even though I live in town and there isn’t much evidence of it, but I live in the middle of coal country. And so I sought out some subjects to photograph.”

Throughout working on the project since 2006, Lieberman learned more about the coal miners’ values and sense of self.

“They all wanted to be photographed with their kids, which is telling. These coal miners are very family-oriented,” Lieberman said with a chuckle.

Lieberman said that familial pride is evident not just in the photos but in the reactions to his exhibit that’s on display.

“The kids of these miners are just absolutely thrilled to see their dads immortalized like this,” he said. “I mean, they come to the exhibits and they stand in front of them and they’re beaming from ear to ear and they’re so proud. And and the wives and the kids really are. And the miners themselves are extremely happy that these things are being shown.”

Lieberman says 16 pieces, including most of the ones from his house, will find a permanent home at Chief Logan State Park. The exhibit will become a permanent part of the West Virginia State Museum collection.

The exhibit is expected to be picked up from Lieberman’s home in Charleston, on Aug. 23. He’s thrilled to know more people will see it — and understand a bit more about those who do this often dangerous but important job.

“My work in these portraits had really been sort of a celebration,” he said. These were sort of heroic figures. I mean, they, you know, they work very hard under terrible conditions, but they powered America.”

You Can Help Paint a New Picture of Appalachia

Fifty years ago President Lyndon Johnson declared a War on Poverty, and photographs taken at the time continued to define what Appalachia looks like for decades afterwards. Now one Appalachian photographer is working to modernize this vision of the region.

Roger May started a new project called Looking at Appalachia: 50 Years After the War on Poverty and He’s asking photographers from across the region to submit photos.

“I thought a really good way to celebrate the 50th anniversary would be to crowd source a project whereby photographers working in these 13 Appalachian states could photograph what they know as Appalachia and use these photographs as sort of a visual archive,” May said.

May believes many people from outside Appalachia, and even those from the region, continue to define it through the photographs showing abject poverty that were taken 50 years ago.

“It was a very limited view of a very limited swath of Appalachia.”

March 8, 2014. Rachel Hartzler, 7, takes a minute in between sessions of playing tag behind the Sugar Tree Country Store during the Highland Maple Festival in McDowell, Highland County, Virginia. The families of the children were at the country store to sell maple ice cream and maple chicken as a part of the festival. Hartzler and her sister, who are Mennonite, say they have never cut their hair.

May doesn’t want to limit the input for this project so he decided to open it up to anyone willing to visually document the region. And he doesn’t necessarily want to intentionally avoid poverty and stereotypes.

“We have to be inclusive and to deny that those things exist doesn’t do anyone any good. We have to see that poverty does exist but there’s so much more to Appalachia than those poverty pictures from 50 years ago.”

May hopes the project will stimulate conversation among many, including photographers, scholars, sociologists and folklorists.

“And that is to sort of pull back and think about what it is to be from Appalachia. Visually has it changed, how has it changed?”

February 22, 2014. Brandon Kline, of St. Albans, West Virginia, rides his bicycle across the Antietam Iron Works Bridge. Spanning Antietam Creek south of Sharpsburg, Maryland, in Washington County, the bridge was built in 1832.

May will curate the collection online and hopes to feature some of the best photos in an exhibit eventually that can travel across the region.

The guidelines for submitting photos are:

All work submitted must be the copyright of the photographer
Photographs must be made in calendar year 2014.
Photographs must be made in one of the 13 state’s counties the Appalachian Regional Commission defines as Appalachia.
Submissions are open through 31 December 2014.

May also says the submissions must:

As much information as possible about each photograph, but at minimum the date, city, county, and state
Be in .JPG format, sized at 1500 pixels wide, 72ppi.
File names must include your last name and the city and state where the photograph was made (example: maychattaorywv2.jpg)
He would also like submissions to include a link to photographers’ websites

Documentary Photographer 'Testifies' on Upbringing in Southern W.Va.

Photographs depicting life in West Virginia and other parts of Appalachia have long been the subject of controversy. One documentary photographer with roots in the state’s southern coal fields is seeking to change that through his work but also has motives far more personal.

“The pictures have this visual context of Appalachia, or at least the mountains. Even if you don’t even know what Appalachia is, you can see this rural, country, mountain way of life,” said documentary photographer Roger May as he spoke about his project Testify.

He affectionately refers to the project as a “visual love letter to Appalachia.”

“What you can’t see but you need some sort of back story is my looking for something to sort of hold onto from my childhood and something to sort of carry with me and identify these things that are often not exactly how we remember them,” he said.

Born across the river in Pike County, Kentucky and raised in Chattaroy in Mingo County, May has lived in Raleigh, North Carolina since the late ‘80s. He recalled his formative years in the southern West Virginia coal fields and his mother’s reasons for relocating the family to North Carolina.

“I was becoming more aware that we were poor and we were on welfare. And my mom, as a single mom of two boys, she didn’t want our only option to be to work in the coal mines. She felt like if we stayed, and if I stayed through high school, that’s pretty much what was going to happen,” said May.

Although he’s returned to the area often to visit family, just over six years ago May began what he calls “making photographs” of the people and the area he still calls home.

“I try to be very deliberate when I say ‘I’m making pictures’ or ‘making photographs’ rather than ‘taking’ because, that one letter, so much hinges on that. These people have been taken—they’ve had enough taken from them already—I don’t want to be another taker in a long line of takers,” he said.

Initially compiling a body of work that protested mountaintop mining, May’s focus eventually turned into a reflection on his childhood and upbringing in the Tug Fork Valley.

The photographs from Testify document the spectrum of scenery in the state’s southern coalfields, from landscapes of the mountains to mining facilities—even the people May calls his own.

At its core, Testify, serves to champion the place where May is from, but also attempts to reconcile his memories of growing up with the reality of life in the area.

“This project has just been a creative process to kind of work that out. I say ‘memory versus reality’ and memory is a real thing and reality is a real thing. Those don’t always line up. Somewhere in the middle is probably a more accurate reflection of what actually happened,” he said.

May’s limited edition collection of photos will be published by Horse & Buggy Press. It is scheduled for release in September and was entirely funded by a Kickstarter campaign he launched earlier this year.