Where is the Pornography in this Image?

For the second time in as many days I start by recommending that you head over to BagNewsNotes and read a post - this one - by Michael Shaw. Then head to Conscientious and read this one by Joerg Colberg. Each post explores the wide-ranging issues raised by the use of the image I have lifted here. It was taken by Katie Falkenberg and has become the center of political dispute because community-slash-environmental activist Maria Gunnoe incorporated the image into a slideshow she constructed as part of testimony before the House Committee on Natural Resources. The image depicts a young girl bathing in nasty water caused by a mining technique called mountaintop removal in the area where she lives in West Virginia. For her efforts, Gunnoe was detained - at the instigation of staff from the committee - by Capitol police and questioned as to whether she is involved in the production and distribution of child pornography.*

I have written here repeatedly about the multiple vagaries of child porn. Whatever we might put into that category, this image here does not fit. Unless, that is, you find it pornographic that people are compelled to live in such conditions. But the pornography here is political as well. The Republican leadership of this committee - the Chair is Douglas Lamborn (R - Colorado), the staff who called the police are his minions  - is truly despicable. The act is called censorship - not just of this image but of Gunnoe's testimony.
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* If you want to see the context within which Gunnoe presented this image, you can find a link to a pdf of her testimony here.

COAL+ICE

At The New Yorker you can find this report on what looks to be an exciting exhibition opening in Beijing (In know! Not exactly my neighborhood.) The show, curated by Jeroen de Vries and Susan Meiselas is called COAL + ICE and includes work by a bunch of remarkable photographers from both China and abroad. It tries to establish visual links between various links in the process of extracting and using fossil fuel - specifically coal. So, we have images from mining to pronounced, large-scale environmental change. The exhibition is up through November 28th.

Kosorukov ~ Coal Miners

Photograph © Gleb Kosorukov.

At The Guardian today there is a short essay, a slide show, and a brief video revolving in one or another way around a project by Gleb Kosorukov at coal mines in the Ukraine. This work is, I think, yet another powerful installment in what should be considered a photographic tradition depicting men who work in extractive industries. I have posted on the topic multiple times before.

Mark Nowak ~ Coal Mountain Elementary

Poet Mark Nowak and collaborator, photographer Ian Teh, have assembled a pretty remarkable book called Coal Mountain Elementary (Coffee House Press, 2009). Notice the verb. The book was not exactly written by Nowak. All the text consists of more or less alternating passages from three sources: (1) testimony provided by miners who survived the 2006 Sago, West Virginia explosion (in which a dozen miners died) and from members of the rescue teams that struggled to save them - the testimony was given to the state Office of Miner's Health & Safety; (2) a curriculum for schoolchildren developed by the American Coal Foundation; and (3) press reports of the death and mayhem created by numerous mid-decade mining disasters in China. Interspersed with the text are a couple of dozen uncaptioned photographs - half by Nowak, half by Teh - of the area surrounding Sago and various mines in China. This is an extremely creative endeavor to prompt readers to think about commonalities and complicities and connections relying, powerfully, on the irony of lessons designed for elementary school pupils to do so.

The Week in Coal

The Guardian (16 November 07): Victoria, Australia. An aerial view
of a coal mine that collapsed, washing away a road and railway lines.
Photograph © Newspix/Rex Features.

BBC (18 November 07): A build up of methane gas in a coal mine
in eastern Donetsk, Ukraine, killed at least 90 miners.
It is the worst mine disaster in the country's history.
Photograph © Alexander Khudotepl.
Agence France-Presse - Getty Images.

The Guardian (19 November 07): Banovici, Bosnia:
People search amid industrial waste to collect coal to
sell at a local market. Photograph © Amel Emric/AP.

The Guardian (21 November 07) Chongqing, China: A worker in a pit
at the Moxinpo colliery. Photograph © China Photos/Getty Images.

Solidarity (20)

Nine men died as a result of the collapse at the Crandall Canyon mine over a month ago - six miners trapped in the mine and three men who were killed trying to rescue them. According to the Salt Lake Tribune they were remembered in Huntington, Utah at a community-wide memorial service yesterday. I have been posting images of mines and miners for some time in solidarity with these men, their families, friends and neighbors. This will be the last post in the series.

The Tribune report offers the following brief sketches of these men. It seems appropriate to end this vigil by naming them again.

"* Kerry Allred, nicknamed Flash, a few days shy of his 35th wedding anniversary with Bessie, a guitar-playing man who loved NASCAR before it was cool.
* Don Erickson, a great husband to Nelda, father of three, grandfather of nine, who loved the great outdoors and cracking jokes.
* Luis Alonso Hernandez, who met his wife when they were 8. They fell in love while bowling, going to the beach and dancing.
* Juan Carlos Payan, who loved cars and loved to drive fast, went to the gym frequently and sent money back to Mexico for his siblings' education.
* Brandon Phillips, who leaves behind a 5-year-old "daddy's boy" and loved to hunt, fish, camp and snowboard.
* Manuel Sanchez, an "honest, hard-working" man who gave his family a good home and was a friend to many.
* Dale "Bird" Black, golfer extraordinaire who hunted everything you could get a license for and rode machines like a 16-year-old boy.
* Brandon Kimber, attentive father except when it came to changing poopy diapers, and a guy who loved fixing his dad's truck.
* Gary Jensen, who gave his all to his community as a mine-rescue team member, emergency medical technician and kids' sports coach."

Solidarity (19)

"This photo may be from the Pardee & Curtin #4 on Point Mt. (W Virginia), around early-mid 1950's. My father Earl Nicholson is along the right side,looking off to the right, behind the guy with the pipe in his mouth. My grandfather (James Robinson, mom's dad) is sitting high up, in the middle at the rear, with a cigarette in his mouth. Both, now deceased, lived in Webster Springs." ~ Mike Nicholson

Solidarity (18)

"Coal miners stand outside the Zapadnaya mine (Tula Region). Their mine will soon be closed because of the end of state subsidies. At the time of this photo, the miners had not been paid in over three months. They have stopped digging coal but have continued working without pay to close down the mine shafts. The older miners will soon retire (and hope to receive pensions) and the young ones will soon be unemployed."(circa 1993)

Solidarity (17)

Coal Miner Pul-i-Khumri, Afghanistan (2002)
© Steve McCurry

I have been remiss about posting images in this series. It seems as though all hope is lost of finding the miners at Crandall canyon alive. The issue now seems only to be whether or not the government and the mining company will leave the bodies of the six men buried in the mine.

Solidarity (16)

“Coal miners going home from work. Omar, West Virginia”
September 1938 © Marion Post Wolcott

Solidarity (15)

Three Generations of Welsh Miners (1950) © W. Eugene Smith

Solidarity (14)

Zhdanovskaya Coal Miners, Ukraine, 1992 © Shepard Sherbell

Solidarity (13)

"Slantsy, Russia: A miner looks out of a carriage in Leningradskaya
slate mine." Photograph © Anatoly Maltsev/EPA
(from The Guardian)

Solidarity (12)

"Needs are not equally recognized because, first, owing to the norms and values of a particular society, they receive unequal recognition, and secondly, because certain needs are not expressed, or not expressed strongly enough. People may not be able to express needs owing to legal constraints, lack of education, lack of organization, or lack of access to the public sphere. ... The good citizen does not substitute his or her values for the persons and groups whose needs are in want of recognition, or are not fully recognized, but rather displays solidarity with them. ... Solidarity is due all persons, and groups of persons, whose needs are not recognized, or not fully recognized. The virtue of solidarity is not the virtue of charity (of the righteous person). Solidaritydoes not entail the gesture 'Here I am, and I will satisfy your unrecognized need.' Solidarity has nothing to do with need satisfaction. It is the virtue invested in need recognition ... But the virtue of solidarity is not simply a 'good wish' either, nor is it restricted to the recognition of needs and values on the part of those who display solidarity. It is an active virtue. The person who displays solidarity makes his or her best effort (everything which is in his or her power) to ensure that the needs and values in question are recognized by all." - Agnes Heller Beyond Justice (Blackwell, 1987).

"Coal Miner, Harlan County, Kentucky, 1997" © Ken Light

"Coal Keeps the Lights On, Cabin Creek,
West Virginia, 2002" © Ken Light

"Raw sewage runs into the Elkhorn Creek. Rolfe Bottom Road,
Northfolk, West Virginia, 2002" © Ken Light

I agree with Heller when she distinguishes between the satisfaction and the recognition of needs. I also agree with her regarding the active character of solidarity. And I agree too that it consists not in the ascription of needs to others but the recognition of needs that they might voice, but that for various reasons they do not or cannot express. Sorting all that out in a clear way is, I think, a complicated, but not insurmountable theoretical task.

I disagree with Heller, though, when she characterizes solidarity as a virtue; here I side with Hannah Arendt, for whom solidarity is a principle. It is, therefore, not something internal to me, or a feature of my 'character.' Instead, Arendt insists, “solidarity is a principle that can inspire or guide action.” Like other principles, solidarity on her view operates externally, in the public world, and so differs qualitatively from passions and emotions that serve as internal motivations. This public character underwrites an instrumental conception of principles and of how we do things with them. On such a view we deploy the principle of solidarity most broadly to establish what I would call "similarity relations" between ourselves and others. Solidarity enables us, for example, to call attention to the plight of those who perform very dangerous work in the dark and who often live in squalor because, in some fundamental way, we see that they are like ‘us.’

Solidarity (11)

Federico Patellani "Minatori di Carbonia (Miners of Carbonia),
Sardinia 1950" © Archivio Patellani

Here are a couple of provocative columns from The Washington Post and The Huffington Post addressing the toxic legacy of coal mining for our environment, national security, mining communities ... voicing solidarity does not imply any romantic vision of mining or the damage it does.

Solidarity (10)

“Coal Mining, Dhanbad, Bihar, India, 1989" © Sebastião Salgado

Solidarity (9)

Walker Evans, "A Miner's Home, West Virginia, 1935"

Solidarity (8)

Lewis Hine, Child coal miners - drivers and mules,
Gary, W. Va., mine, 1908

Lewis Hine, Miner's family, Scott's Run, West Virginia, 1936

Utah Search for 6 Miners Is Suspended Indefinitely (Solidarity 7)

Here are two postcards depicting people who gathered following a mine explosion in Eccles, West Virginia in April, 1914. Somewhere around 185 miners died (accounts differ) in this disaster. I must say that the crowd scenes here remind me in an uncanny way of postcards that were made bearing photos of spectators at lynchings in the U.S during this period and subsequently.

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By the way, the six miners burried in the Crandal Canyon mine have names - Kerry Allred, Manuel Sanchez, Don Erickson, Luis Hernandez, Brandon Phillips and Juan Carlos Payan. The three men killed while trying to rescue them also had names - Dale Black, Brandon Kimber and Gary Jensen.

Solidarity (6)

Mines #19, Westar Open Pit Coal Mine, Spawood,
British Columbia 1984 © Edward Burtynsky

It is perhaps difficult to comprehend the daunting scale of mining operations that coal miners confront on a daily basis insofar as many are more or less wholly underground. This picture of an open pit coal minie offers a hint of the magnitude of the excavations.