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Coal miners up close and life-size

Georgetown College exhibit honors them

By Rich Copley Herald-Leader Culture Columnist

Thorney Lieberman spent years in New York trying to shoot architectural images of the city that replicated the experience of being in the presence of the actual objects.

"I had this idea if you looked out a 50- by 60-foot window, you should be able to replicate that experience of seeing what you see out of that window," Lieberman says.

But it never quite worked. "I never quite conquered the scale of New York architecture," Lieberman says.

But he has with coal miners, and that is the major point of his exhibit, Honoring America's Coal Miners, which is at Georgetown College's Cochenour Gallery through Oct. 7.

By creating life-size, detailed portraits of miners, Lieberman wants to put a human face on coal mining, which he thinks is often written off as a faceless industry.

Lieberman has come to regard the miners as "American heroes, engaged in dangerous work to supply us with energy," he says in his artist's statement.

The project began after Lieberman moved to Charleston, W.Va., where his wife, Anne, grew up. They were just settling into the Mountain State when the Sago Mine disaster of Jan. 2, 2006, took the lives of 12 miners.

The event garnered national media attention for days, and Lieberman became aware, "This was the reality of West Virginia, and this was my community."

While living in Colorado, Lieberman had worked on a project creating life-size, sharply detailed portraits of Native Americans, and he decided he wanted to do something similar with miners. He went to the United Mine Workers office around the corner from his home to start looking for people willing to pose for him.

For Lieberman's style of photography, posing is not a small request.

His life-size portraits are created from separate images shot on 8- by 10-inch film. For instance, Coy and Carrisa, a portrait of a miner and his daughter, is made up of 34 separate images.

Lieberman's camera is mounted on a 10-foot-tall frame that he moves down and across the subject's body to photograph each part in 1-to-1 scale. That requires the subject to stand relatively still for 15 minutes, hit repeatedly with a flash that is "brighter than the sun," Lieberman says.

And we're not talking models here. These were coal miners, right after work.

"I told them not to shower or anything," Lieberman said. "I wanted to show what they looked like after a day on the job."

To get to Greenwood Community Church, where Lieberman had set up shop, Coy had to ride from the mine in the bed of his pickup because his wife wouldn't let him in the cab.

The miners, he said, did very well during the process.

"The people like these portraits because they are powerful, celebratory," Lieberman says.

He particularly likes the way the exhibit is set up in the gallery at Georgetown College because it is a corridor, "so when you stand in there, it's like you're surrounded by them. These are very intimate images, and you can inspect them even more closely than if you were standing with the person."

And that achieves Lieberman's goal of confronting people with the human side of coal mining. That, he says, is even why several subjects were photographed with their children.

Honoring America's Coal Miners has drawn wide support from the coal industry. The International Coal Group and its vice president, general counsel and secretary, Roger Nicholson, who is a Georgetown alum, underwrote Lieberman's exhibit at the college.

In the midst of debate about energy policy, Lieberman is unabashedly aiming to tell a side of the coal story he thinks is not being heard, about the effects moving away from coal-based energy would have on miners and people in many ancillary businesses, and even another side of the mountaintop-removal story.

"I want this exhibit to move out of coal country, where we're kind of preaching to the choir," Lieberman says. "I'd like to get this exhibit into Washington, D.C., where our lawmakers can see it."

And he wants to take documenting the coal industry further, into a book.

The project's Web site, www.americascoalminers.com, includes coal country images Lieberman has shot, and images in the mines above and below the surface.

"When I started working on this, I knew I was entering a whole other world," Lieberman says. "Being a photographer, that's what you do: You're thrown into situations to photograph, and you learn about those situations.

"I'll be working on this for a while. There's a lot more to this story."