COAL

For a year, on and off, I photographed underground across seventeen mines in Western Pennsylvania, all owned by Rosebud Mining, and I've never experienced anything like it. There's next to no light down there, and in the complete darkness it can get eerily quiet — I made four to six thousand frames a day off nothing but the machinery and the headlamps, theirs and mine, much of it on my hands and knees in a cut thirty-six inches high running miles into the rock. The danger never lets up, and the crews carry it like it's ordinary. I photographed the day crew below and the night crew up top, both in a single day, along with the men and women in the fabrication shop above, where the machinery is built and kept running. But the real endurance was never mine. It belonged to the crews below and above, and the photographs here are a record of them.

There's a point in the descent where the daylight quits and the only light left is the one strapped to your head. This is a body of work made in that dark — a record of the men who spend their working lives beneath us, cutting coal out of the rock by the same hard logic it's been cut by for generations. The photographs aren't after the machinery or the tonnage. They're after the faces: the soot worn like a second skin, the quiet between shifts, the particular dignity of people who do the kind of work most of us never see and rarely think about. It's a world that's shrinking, and this is what it looked like from the inside.