Gordon Smith’s (b. 1952) black-and-white photographs of Kentucky’s coal mining country and its people are disturbing documents of hardscrabble life. His images tell the story of the miners and their families who endure the crushing poverty that forces them to destroy their very environment to survive.

A part of the photographic tradition of social commentary, Smith began this powerful series in 1994. Then the incidence of incredibly destructive mountaintop removal mining was growing because of the increased demand for low-sulfur coal.[1] The process starts with cutting down the trees on the mountaintop and using explosives to blow off the top. Bulldozers and shovels scrape away the exposed veins of coal and fill nearby valleys with the waste. More than 500 Appalachian mountaintops have been destroyed and 1.4 million acres of forest lost. Thousands of miles of streams have been buried and millions of gallons of water have been contaminated. All this is due to mountaintop removal mining.[2]

It’s impossible to look at Smith’s images of the people, their homes, and the land that surrounds them without thinking about other photographers who documented similar situations of abject poverty. In the late 1880s, social reformer and journalist Jacob Riis (1849-1914)[3] began photographing the squalor in which new immigrants lived in the tenements and dives of the Five Points[4] neighborhood in downtown Manhattan.

The sociologist and photojournalist Lewis Hine (1874-1940) is best known for his work documenting child labor in American industry for the National Child Labor Committee (1908-1918), which lobbied to end the practice, but this is just one area of his work.[5]

The most obvious comparison to Smith’s work is the Farm Security Administration’s (F. S. A.) work. From 1935 to1944, a team of photographers, the best known being Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, recorded the plight of the rural poor during the Great Depression.[6] Smith’s own photographs are in the style of Evans’ unvarnished portraits of farmers and their families as well as their surroundings.

As Smith focuses on the impoverished men, women, and children and their environment of the coalfields of southeastern Kentucky, he creates a narrative needing little elaboration. However, captions for each photograph provide specific details.

In almost lusciously printed silver prints, Smith’s message is reinforced formally with his rich range of blacks and sparing use of whites, emphasizing the very nature of his subjects, the psychological and emotional despair with only a small amount of hope. He uses a 2 ¼” x 2 ¼” camera, which allows him to record the scene in greater detail than a smaller format camera would allow.

Smith’s pictures fall into two categories: portraits of the people and how they live and of their land scarred by the mining that provides their subsistence livelihood.

“Schuster ‘Frog’ Johnston and Brian ‘Bobcat’ Hogg, Hemphill” belongs to the first. Filthy and tired from their shift at a deep mine operation, Frog and Bobcat face the camera, Smith, and ultimately the viewer. This is the same pose used by the German photographer August Sander (1876-1964) for his “People of the Twentieth Century” series.[7]

Frog’s helmet shades his eyes, and his expression is hard to read. But Bobcat, with his head tilted slightly, seems to dare anyone to say anything. It’s a look that the photographer described as “passive vacuity and bitter resignation.”

The caption notes that Frog and Bobcat risk their lives “. . . on a daily basis, crawling on hands and knees along the slimy muck-covered floorways (sic) of an airless catacomb, whose roof is in danger of collapse at any moment.” And this pays 10 bucks an hour, making it one of the best-paying jobs in the area.

With a swing set in the background, “Christine Brown, Cranks Creek” stands barefoot with her arms extended in front of her body with her hands clasped below her waist. Looking about 10-years old, she has a closed-mouth grin and apple checks. Trash, a discarded door, antiquated washing machine, and other castoffs surround her, but she’s oblivious. She’s just enjoying being a kid in her tee shirt and cutoffs. It’s heartbreaking to read that she won’t go on to fourth grade because of “behavioral problems.” It’s a shot worthy of Diane Arbus.

Smith’s work fits easily into the lineage of photographic social commentary, but there is one unexpected photographic comparison. It is between Smith and Henry Peach Robinson (1830-1901), an English proto-Pictorialist. Smith is a “straight” photographer, and Robinson combined separate photographs into a single image, using what’s been described as the “scissors and paste-pot” method of composition. Yet in several aspects, including composition, lighting, and, even intent, in a sense, Smith’s “The Napier Family, Cawood Hill” brings to mind Robinson’s 1858 “Fading Away.”[8]

Using strong contrasts between light and dark for dramatic effect, both photographers have arranged a tableau to convey their message.

In the melodramatic and romantic “Fading Away,” Robinson has placed a beautiful young girl just off center. Lying on a fainting couch, she wears a white nightgown and rests her head on a large white pillow, appearing to be peacefully asleep. She is attended by a toothless old woman on the left while on the right, a much younger woman leans on the back of the chaise. In the background a man in silhouette looks out the window. His head is bowed, unable to see the cloud-filled sky beyond, perhaps a reference to heaven.

Nothing hopeful exists in Smith’s staged composition. The central image is of Green Napier. Now in his 40s, he was born with cerebral palsy. His parents have cared for him his entire life, living on his disability checks. Green lies on an extended recliner, which is partially covered with a white sheet, a white backdrop like the girl’s more comforting pillow. His face is nothing like the calm visage of the dying girl. Instead it is frozen into an exaggerated clown-like frown. His right arm is held in an unnatural position with his hand bent back at the wrist and his fingers curled like claws. He reaches out to his withered mother on the left, the same position occupied by Robinson’s crone. On the right Green’s father stares out at the viewer as if to say, “This is just our life; it’s just the way it is.” He can no more change it than can Robinson’s solitary man.

In addition to the people of coal country, Smith also turns his lens on the land ravaged by mountaintop removal mining. He records the ruin faithfully, but also creates almost abstract images, especially in his aerial views. In “Two Dumpsters, Perry County,” dirt roads sweep in broad arcs, like giant brushstrokes. The two trucks become rectangular shapes in the nearly abstract composition. The swathes of road mark the earth like the Nazca lines in Peru, but here there’s no mystery about how they were made.

Smith’s landscapes can be even more abstract, just compositions of light and dark. Of course, he’s not the only landscape photographer to translate nature into self-conscious art. Ansel Adams comes to mind. What makes Smith’s pictures different is that this land bears witness to its abuse at man’s hand.

Riis, Hine, the F. S. A. photographers, and others in the social commentary tradition all sought to draw attention to the horror of the daily lives of the unfortunate, hoping to spur the powers that be to change it.

Smith has recorded these Appalachian miners as they continue to do what their fathers and grandfathers have done for decades and remain exploited by corporations (remember, they are people, too, but apparently without a conscience). The coal companies offer nothing but a subsistence wage to those who create those profits. And nothing changes.

–Karen S. Chambers

 

Presages: Gordon Smith’s Kentucky Coal Country Photographs on view through September 18, 2011, at the Iris BookCafe and Gallery, 1313 Main St., Cincinnati, OH  45202, 513-381-2665.