First and foremost, Coal Hollow is an album of photographs taken by the University of California’s Ken Light, whose prior work has taken him abroad and to Texas and Mississippi. The photographer is known--and most likely best known to folklorists--for his work in Mississippi, published in 1995 as Delta Time: Mississippi Photographs. Light is assisted here by his wife, Melanie, who is a writer and the Executive Director of Fotovision, a San Francisco-area organization involved in documentary photography.
Their subject is an area of southwest West Virginia that radiates from the town of Beckley, the county seat of Raleigh County, whose rural precincts are home to many of the images in the book. Finding--or locating--"Coal Hollow" itself in the real world is a more challenging task than finding Beckley, Fireco, or Fayetteville. That’s because "Coal Hollow" is not a real place. "Coal Hollow" is what the book calls a "fictional composite of the communities the Lights surveyed." That becomes something of a problem for this project when it asserts the claim of representing that which is real and actual.
The photographs themselves are strong images, rendered with a professional eye for composition and contrast. But like Melanie Light’s text, they are burdened by a high duty to represent an area, a population, an industry that doesn’t have a typical town, a typical family, a typical inhabitant, or a typical story. In fact, the photographer and author seem not to have had much interest in identifying a smaller number of communities and individuals who might convey the messages of dis-entitlement, poverty, and resilience that Coal Hollow attempts to squeeze from scattered images and transcripts of brief conversations with residents. Those nine conversations, each burdened with an overly-long and redundant introduction by Ms. Light that essentially informs the reader about what the interviewee has to say, certainly do not deserve to be called "oral histories."
As Orville Schell points out in a brief but excellent foreword, Ken Light’s work is attached to the photographic tradition of photographers who have worked in this region and to the larger inquiries into industrial and post-industrial life conducted by George Orwell and the team of Walker Evans and James Agee. The connection to the latter is made particularly clear by image 58, "Gourd Birdhouse. Southern West Virginia, 2002," which is way too similar to the depiction of a similar birdhouse that comprises the last photograph in Walker Evans’ portfolio for Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
The real story of this place, the West Virginia corner of a mining region that stretches into Kentucky, Virginia, and Ohio, has been and is currently being told by Goldenseal, the remarkable magazine published by the West Virginia Division of History and Culture. Since 1975, Goldenseal has been attentive in its investigation and forthright in its publication of stories from West Virginia’s mining fields, publishing literally hundreds of images, historical and contemporary, from the places Ken and Melanie Light briefly visited. Comparing these two different depictions of "Coal Hollow," an immediate difference becomes clear. Almost every one of Light’s photographs focuses on a single individual, an object found in a yard, roadkill. Goldenseal shows families, congregations, workplaces, stores, and other gathering spots. In their efforts to construct their own "Coal Hollow," the Lights have overlooked the real communities that comprise it.
There are images in Coal Hollow that are, and deserve to be considered, works of art. Few would quarrel that we are the better for this distinguished and talented photographer to have taken them and to have shared them in this large, handsome book. Folklorists may wonder whether the people who live in "Coal Hollow" are better off for the many close-ups of their lined and weary faces, or the efficacy of a very selective, if evocative, rendition of their lives and circumstances. Some of these same complaints have dogged Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Unlike that earlier work, which was anchored by two families, Coal Hollow ultimately lacks a center, and as a consequence, a real identity.
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[Review length: 673 words • Review posted on February 27, 2008]