BUILDER LEVY: APPALACHIA USA

This page:

Coal Camp, near Grundy, Buchanan County, Virginia, 1970.

Opposite, clockwise:

The Church Family, Thacker Mines, Mingo County, West Virginia, 1970.

Toby Moore, Old House Branch Mine, Eastern Coal Company, Pike County, Kentucky, 1970. Prepare to Meet God, Williamson, Mingo County, West Virginia, 1971.

Christopher Jones, Assistant Curator of Exhibitions

JUL 10 – SEP 13, 2015

Museum of Art, Searing Wing

This July, The Ringling Museum of Art will host Appalachia USA, an epic documentary project by the New York-based photographer Builder Levy (b. 1942) that presents life and labor in coal mining communities through lush black and white photographs. Levy connects us to the labor at the heart of coal mining, bringing us deep underground where miners toil at the arduous and sometimes perilous work. Through Levy’s adept, empathetic portraiture, we also connect to the miners on a personal level, and throughout the series, we come to experience a sense of cultural and social space. His lens captures the intimate interiors of family homes, takes in the natural beauty of the landscape (even as it is marred through mining) and presents the particular rural material culture and environment that marks the region’s unique identity. Appalachia USA attends to the turbulent politics of economics and labor that have revolved around coal mining in America. Levy documents the picket lines of striking miners and their families, and the organization of communities to improve their standard of life.

Levy began the work in 1968 and continued documenting the region for over forty years. Initially the project was a labor of love. While a student in the 1960s, Levy photographed civil rights marches and demonstrations—many of his shots were published in the journal Freedomways. He undertook the Appalachian project as a continuation of his commitment to civil rights and his interest in documenting the social landscape of America. In doing so, he hoped to dispel popular “hillbilly” stereotypes by presenting his subjects in a way that emphasizes their humanity and personality.

Levy also challenges our preconceptions of Appalachian culture by bringing to our attention the racial diversity in the region’s communities and in the coalfields. What is fascinating about Appalachia USA is Levy’s willingness to employ a variety of photographic strategies throughout the work, from deadpan architectural compositions to landscape views and posed portraits, in order to give a broader and more contextualized account of his subject. His last trips to coal communities in the 2000s present expansive aerial views to survey the social and environmental impact of mountaintop removal, blasting, and strip mining.

Levy’s approach to photographing is indebted to the long tradition of American humanist documentary photography. That practice includes reformers like Lewis Hine who used the medium to document the exploitation of child laborers in factories in order to bring the problem to the attention of the public. In the 1930s, Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans recorded the bleak realities of the Great Depression with forceful images that were so sharp and direct they now define that era in the popular consciousness. Levy learned his craft at Brooklyn College from Walter Rosenblum, another noted social documentarian and street photographer whose life’s work strove for a dignified representation of the underprivileged and the marginalized. Like his forerunners, Levy still has faith in the efficacy of the photograph as a way to interpret and teach about the world.