American coal: Russell Lee portraits

Uittreksel

"In 1946 the Truman administration made a promise to striking coal miners: as part of a deal to resume work, the government would sponsor a survey of health and labor conditions in mining camps. One of the researchers, dispatched to scores of sites nationwide, was photographer Russell Lee. Lee had made his name during the Depression, when, alongside Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, Lee used his camera to expose the wages of poverty and Jim Crow. Now he trained his lens on miners and their families to show their impact on the nation's first wave of postwar growth. This collection of photographs--featured at the National Archives and Record Administration in an exhibition titled 'Power & Light'--includes Lee's original, detailed captions as well as commentary from Lee's biographer, Mary Jane Appel and historian Douglas Brinkley. Together, they illuminate Lee's career and his involvement with the survey, the history of labor disputes between the United Mine Workers Association and mine operators in the 1940s, and capture the vitality and resourcefulness of the diverse subjects--miners of many races and national origins, their wives, and their children at work and at play, at church and in beauty pageants, in moments of joy, struggle, and vivid banality. Ultimately, Lee's strikingly human photographs inspired rural hospital construction and mine safety improvements for the people whose work was so critical to the functioning of the country making do in often-terrible conditions"-- Provided by publisher.