40 Years in Appalachia

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Pictured: "Prepare to Meet God, Williamson, Mingo County, West Virginia. Photo by: Builder Levy.

The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art continues its Art of Our Time initiative with Appalachia USA, an exhibition from photographer Builder Levy, as he explores the Appalachian coal industry and its impacts on the people and environment with a photographic series more than 40 years in the making. Through 50 black and white photographs, taken from 1968-2009, mostly in West Virginia and Kentucky, Appalachia USA chronicles a complicated history, one of progress, of subjugation, of social change and social upheaval, boom and bust, where somebody’s getting rich while miners remain caught between food on the table and the fight for safer working conditions.

“Levy’s photographs bring to life a group of people who have often been marginalized and stereotyped in the media,” said Christopher Jones, assistant curator of exhibitions at The Ringling. “This exhibition displays the artist’s dedication to documenting the region and the community, and to capture the changing story of Appalachia and its people.”

A series of aerial photographs reveals the broader picture, the geography that serves as much a character in this drama as the miner. In one photograph, a mining camp skinned in corrugated aluminum and raised on stilted beams juts from the surrounding woodland, an outpost or foothold amidst the green. Continuing down the line, the outpost is a stronghold, with gravel pours and wide dirt tracks criss-crossing barren hillside. It’s a story of intrusion, culminating with a birds-eye view of a refuse impoundment, a manmade reservoir for mining waste byproducts.

The remaining majority of the exhibit, however, is dedicated to the people themselves, mostly miners, but also family members and activists, as Levy even scrambles down the shafts for intimate and candid shots of the men at work, where it’s all smoky caverns and low ceilings, with sooted faces wrestling heavy machinery. In Morning Shift, it’s an assemblage of boyish miners looking too young to shave, while Waiting and Whittling affords a glimpse of the men at rest, seated around tires and assorted equipment, cracking jokes and biding time.

Another wall stands dedicated to portraiture, with Levy bringing his subjects front and center. On one end, Nimrod Workman hangs enshrined, a miner from West Virginia who fought in the Battle of Blair Mountain. A few frames down, Andrew Kosto stares down the camera, his face caught in stark relief beneath a battered miner’s helmet, roughly a year before his death, crushed by falling slate.

The exhibit continues and Levy’s camera ceaselessly captures this separate world where children in sundresses pick their way through quarry rocks and fallen piling, where activists and industry collide. Appalachia USA is currently on display in The Ringling Museum until Sept. 13.

Pictured: "Prepare to Meet God, Williamson, Mingo County, West Virginia. Photo by: Builder Levy.

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