The Photographer Chronicling the Destruction of Appalachia

This piece appears in the columns section of frieze 247, ‘Lay of the Land’

I first visited Federal Correctional Institution McDowell, built on the former Indian Ridge mountain in West Virginia, in 2010, around the height of mountaintop removal coal mining, which destroyed more than 500 peaks across Appalachia. The road leading up to the prison had been cut through the former mountain, blasted away to expose millennia of rock strata. Mining had carved an isolated hole with high walls on all sides. (‘The ideal geography for a correctional facility’ is how the architect, AECOM, described the location.) What I was looking at was part of an insatiable cycle: one that started well before the extraction of coal and has continued through the extraction of labour and value in other ways, with no end in sight.

In the Appalachian regions, where I am from, this has been especially evident. After widespread clear-cut timbering in the early 1900s cleared the terrain for coal mining, single-industry economies and exploitative labour practices made workers dependent on industry. By the 1970s, with the advent of mountaintop removal mining and the mechanization of the field, workers lost their jobs and local communities were devastated. Each subsequent wave of industry further cantilevered communities and ecosystems, making increasingly precarious incarnations of extraction all but inevitable.

To address the exponential impacts of new mining practices, the US Congress passed the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 (SMCRA). The act mandates that, after mining, a company must restore ‘the original contour of the land’ or redevelop the site for an ‘equal or better economic or public use’ – an optimistic attempt to put a stopper in the unidirectional flow of extraction.

But, at its core, is a flaw: that replacing one form of capitalist extraction with another could fill the gap left by the first. Strip malls (built on former mining sites) provide local employment, but the labour terms of big-box chain stores are designed to wrest as much value as possible to company headquarters, evading benefit premiums and paying as little as the market will bear in the vacuum left by mining. These developments, instead of stopping the flow, perpetuate oppressive labour dynamics and consumerism, effectively replicating previous extractive models.

My series of photographs, ‘Better or Equal Use’ (2020–ongoing), depicts redevelopment projects ushered in by SMCRA. For United States Penitentiary Big Sandy on the Former Betty’s Knob (2020/24), I shot one of the first major carceral projects built as a ‘better or equal use’ on a mountaintop removal site. The prison, which opened in 2003, is known as ‘Sink Sink’ because leaning guard towers and cellblocks are sinking into the slurry pond they were built on. Incarcerating mostly men of colour, it’s a striking example of environmental injustice. Other images, like Fish and Wildlife Habitat on the Former Kayford Mountain (2024), show sites that have been redeveloped as nature preserves – with mine rubble and debris pushed into mountain-like structures that are inhospitable to native plants.

At each site I photograph, I collect coal lying on the ground: the material evidence of the violence of mining left hidden in plain sight. I wanted to make sure that the mining history of each location wasn’t erased, but visible and present, so I devised a process to print the photographs using coal. I finely grind it and mix it with chemicals to create photographic paper, onto which the images are printed.

Photography has always relied on extracted minerals, from the earliest salt prints to Kodak’s voracious consumption of silver. My works do not attempt to hide their material source; rather, their uneven, coal-flecked surfaces draw attention to broader connections between the history of photography and mining. The process I developed is based on carbon printing, used in the late 1800s to conjure land as bountiful and available, and to glorify industry in photographs that promoted extraction in the cultural imaginary. In contrast to this history, my images question the progress narrative of these genres.

It’s a myth that extraction is a singular activity. To disrupt its ever-evolving cycle, it is critical to recognize its history and the interrelationship between its different forms. Images are extracted as easily as coal, and creating artworks that intervene in this dynamic requires addressing the material and cultural relationships of extraction to our mediums.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 247 with the headline ‘Shooting Sinkholes’

^{Main image: Jonas N.T. Becker, Better or Equal Use: Fish and Wildlife Habitat on the former Kayford Mountain (detail), 2024, coal, gelatin, dichromate and paper, 51 × 61 cm. Courtesy: the artist; photograph: Robert Divers Herrick}