COAL
A year on and off in the Pennsylvania coal fields
Coal was one of those stories I'd been circling for years. As an industrial photographer, you chase a lot of things, and this one I chased the better part of a decade before it finally opened—year, on and off, down in seventeen mines out in Western Pennsylvania, all Rosebud Mining Company operations.
I still don't quite have the words for it. Every morning started before the sun with safety training, and then you suit up—coveralls, and this belt that carries everything the dark asks of you: a small portable oxygen supply, a proximity sensor, hard hat, headlamp, flashlight, kneepads, big boots. I'd lay on my back on a low car and they'd run me in, sometimes the better part of an hour, into a cut maybe eighteen feet wide and, on a good day, thirty—eight to forty—eight inches of ceiling—running one to five miles back into the rock. You're on your hands and knees most of the day. And there's no light. None. I was shooting four to six thousand frames a day off nothing but the glow off the machines and whatever the headlamps threw. Sometimes it goes so quiet down there it gets eerie.
It takes everything you've got just to move through a shift, and the danger’s right there the whole time—never lets up, not for a second, not anywhere. And the crews carry all of it like it's an ordinary Tuesday.
I'd photograph the morning crew below, then ride back out in the afternoon to catch the second shift of miners before they went down—both crews, same day. It wasn't all underground, either. Some days I spent up top in the fabrication shop, where they build the machines and keep them running, men and women working in the daylight while the whole operation ran on beneath their feet. Then back to the hotel to wash the day off, download the cards, and start again the next morning—or point the Jeep home, six and a half hours back to Connecticut.
The edit ate up another whole year.
But the endurance was never mine. It was theirs, below ground and above—and these photographs are just what I carried back up.
Over the year I photographed over one hundred men and women, and the ones below are only a handful.
PORTRAITS
ABOVE GROUND
BEHIND THE SCENES
Photos by Karell Craft
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.