Builder Levy
What began in 1968 as a ten-day trip became four decades of my visiting and photographing in coal mines, miners' homes and communities in the hills and "hollers" of West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, south western Virginia, and western Pennsylvania. Rather than travel throughout the whole country as Robert Frank did for his The Americans, I wanted to see America by focusing intensely on one significant, yet little known, region. I was attracted by the rich Appalachian mountain heritage: Once the hunting grounds of the Native Americans, it became a place of escape from the oppressive British rule in the thirteen colonies, and a place where abolitionism was actively supported (250,000 southern mountaineers volunteered for the Union army during the Civil War to end slavery). Since the late 19th century, Appalachia has witnessed the coal miners’ multiracial collective struggles to make life better for themselves, their families and the American working people. Miners have been giving their sweat and blood to help build and provide the energy for the nation.
The Appalachian Mountains, formed 600 million years ago, are among the oldest in the world and the most bio-diverse in North America.
In the Appalachian coalfields today, both the natural environment as well as human communities in the valleys and hollows of these low sulfur coal-rich mountains are being systematically destroyed by the most efficient and devastating method of coal extraction: mountaintop removal mining. The coal companies are able to mine more coal faster and cheaper by blasting off the tops of mountains, and dumping the overburden, full of chunks of rock and pulverized rock (containing dissolvable poisonous heavy metals) over the mountainside into the valleys, hollows and streams, creeks and rivers below. Many coal communities, having persevered in the hills and hollows of southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky for generation upon generation, are now being threatened with systematic extinction by mountaintop removal mining.
Coal is an inefficient, polluting, carbon based fuel that, when burned in large electric power plants, contributes to the depletion of the ozone layer and global warming. The last decade has seen a growing environmental movement made up of local and national organizations trying to save the central Appalachian Mountains and their communities. Individuals and organizations are raising their voices, demanding an end to the devastating practice of mountaintop removal.
My primary focus continues to center on the life of the people and their enduring humanity, but now more than ever, on their mountains, whose fate affects them so intrinsically. I am interested in the everyday lives of ordinary Appalachian Americans. I am looking for quotidian beauty, visual poetry and human dignity within a hardscrabble realism.
I am one of a number of contemporary photographers that have photographed Appalachia. However, more than a half a century earlier, Appalachia was visited and photographed by Lewis Hine, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee, and Doris Ulmann. It was these earlier artists that were among those that inspired me most. Their photographic work in Appalachia remains a significant and unique part of American heritage and culture. With my photographs of Appalachia, I hope to add to and extend that legacy. I hope my photographs made over the past forty years can inspire a deeper understanding of and greater appreciation for Appalachia, its people and its mountains, and its unique and significant role in our nation’s heritage.