From the past

I try to put up many historical photographs on this blog with the ideas that memory can be very subversive and that it helps to remember where we come from. It happens that much of what I put up comes from mining communities in the United States, but I will try to change that.

Coal miners and a flat bottom cutting machine as it undercuts 30 inch coal so that it can be popped down later with a small charge of explosives. This photograph was taken at the Reels Cove mine at Marion County, TN. on the Cumberland Plateau, near Whitwell.

Child of a squatter family moving out of the Camp Croft area near Whitestone, South Carolina, March 1941 in a photograph by Jack Delano for the Farm Security Administration, Library of Congress and Ward Weems.

Grandmother from a farm in Oklahoma; eighty years old. Now living in camp on the outskirts of Bakersfield, California. "If you lose your pluck you lose the most there is in you - all you've got to live with" November 1936 in a photograph by Dorothea Lange for the Farm Security Administration, Library of Congress and Ward Weems.

A coal camp in West Virginia

‘Aunt' Samantha Bumgarner of from Dillsboro, North Carolina, fiddler, banjoist, and guitarist, Asheville, North Carolina, 1937 in photographs by Ben Shahn for the United States Resettlement Administration, Library of Congress and Ward Weems.

Pauline Clyburn's garden, Manning, Clarendon County, South Carolina, June 1939 in a

photograph by Marion Post Wolcott for the Farm Security Administration, Library of Congress and Ward Weems.

Logan, West Virginia in 1974

The Homestead Steel Mill in 1970