The tradition of documentary photography in the United States stretches back for almost 150 years. Matthew Brady documented the death and destruction of the Civil War; at the turn of the twentieth century, Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine photographed immigrant and working class life in American cities. The genre reached its zenith during the Depression with the remarkable documentary photography of the Farm Security Administration, which included the work of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, and Gordon Parks.[1] That tradition lives on in the recent work of Earl Dotter, Milton Rogovin, Bill Bamberger, and in George Harvan, the subject of this retrospective.[2]

Although George Harvan never worked in the mines of Pennsylvania's Panther Valley, after World War II he returned to his hometown in northeastern Pennsylvania and began to photograph workers in the mines. Over a fifty-year period he created an extensive documentary record of the last generation of underground miners in the Valley. His keen eye for the human condition is reflected not only in his images of the anthracite region but also in the photographs he took wherever he went: Amish country, Gettysburg, along the Lehigh River, in abandoned anthracite breakers, and New York City. He experimented with different kinds of cameras and techniques, moving over time from a straightforward documentary style to more expressive and interpretive approaches. Most recently he has employed pinhole and Polaroid cameras to look at familiar objects in unfamiliar ways.

Harvan himself has summarized his life and work in characteristically modest terms: “During the past fifty years, I have been blessed for some reason with the opportunity to document on film the hard work and simple lifestyle of a rugged band of men—the coal miners of the Panther Valley. Their friendship and the trust placed in me by these miners has been reciprocated by my commitment to record as truthfully as possible the lives of the men who mined the coal.”[3] Harvan's story is indelibly intertwined with that of the region where he has lived for almost eighty years and which he photographed for more than fifty. It is a story that also encompasses and speaks to broader social, economic, and cultural issues posed by modern American life, as well as fundamental questions on the human condition.

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George Harvan and the Panther Valley

The anthracite region of Pennsylvania stretches northeast from Tower City to Carbondale, a narrow swath covering slightly less than five hundred square miles in a triangular five-county area. The region was little more than a wilderness at the turn of the nineteenth century, but with the development of commercial mining operations in the 1820s, and the completion of canal and railroad links to Philadelphia and New York City, the area's population grew rapidly. At its peak, during World War I, the mining and processing of anthracite coal employed 175,000 men and supported a regional population of almost a million. By 1992 that same industry employed fewer than 1,500 workers, supporting perhaps 5,000 people. George Harvan lived in the anthracite region during this period of dramatic economic and social decline, and since World War II his photographs have provided a documentary record of its accompanying transformation. Diverse communities grew up as anthracite production expanded in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Major cities like Scranton and Wilkes-Barre emerged in the northern tier of the region, while further south, smaller cities and towns dotted a distinctly rural landscape. George Harvan's hometown, Lansford, with a population of about 9,600 in 1920, was a small urban center in the Panther Valley. Coal mining and allied railroading employed more than two-thirds of the community's workforce.

The Panther Valley stretches twelve miles southwest of Jim Thorpe (formerly Mauch Chunk), nestled between two rows of gentle mountain ridges. It begins in the hills above the Lehigh River and ends where the Little Schuylkill River cuts through surrounding mountains. Marking the divide between the Lehigh and Schuylkill watersheds, the Valley contains rich deposits of anthracite coal that for 150 years provided the economic lifeblood of its communities. First settled by residents of English, Irish, and Welsh origins, by the early twentieth century the region attracted increasing numbers of central, eastern, and southern European immigrants with the lure of good-paying jobs in and around the mines; among them were George Harvan's parents.

Andrew and Anna Harvan emigrated from Czechoslovakia with their three daughters shortly after World War I, and soon found their way to northeastern Pennsylvania. Their son George was born in 1921 in the Panther Valley town of Lansford. Andrew Harvan worked in the mines of the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company, a leading anthracite firm that employed about 8,000 workers in fourteen major mines and breakers. Times were hard for the Harvan family in these years, especially with the coming of the Great Depression. The Depression meant that Panther Valley mines operated only sporadically; miners commonly worked two or three days a week during the thirties. Andrew Harvan developed black lung, which no doubt slowed him down and lowered his earnings. Like other miners' children, George Harvan was expected to make contributions to help support his family. In his teenage years, he took a wheelbarrow out of town and picked coal where veins cropped out of the ground. As he recalled, “My job was to fill the coal bin every summer; …that's how we heated our house, and I had to make sure there was no slate along with the coal—it had to be all coal.”[4].

Harvan's family background and upbringing were very much apiece with that of his neighbors. The American-born son of Slovak immigrants, he was confirmed at St. Michael's Church, the Slovak Catholic Church in Lansford. He attended the West Ward School and Lansford High School and had much in common with his classmates. During the Depression, like others his age, he picked coal, stood in soup lines, and sorted through stacks of donated shoes. He did poorly in school, recalling, “I can't ever remember taking a book home to study. My parents wanted me to go to school, but they never knew enough to say, 'Well, do this, because this is the way you should do it.' So I never really studied.”[5] Immigrant parents, who struggled to speak English themselves, were not in much of a position to prod their son to excel in school. Harvan expected to follow his older sisters, who left Lansford after graduating from high school, to find work in New York City. The Depression forced young people to leave the area; the mines simply were not hiring new workers, and there were more than enough unemployed or underemployed experienced miners in 1938 and 1939 to fill any vacancies that arose.

The New Deal and World War II provided the employment that drew George Harvan out of Lansford. In 1939 he began a two-year stint at a soil conservation camp run by the Civilian Conservation Corps on the Pennsylvania-Maryland border. He then worked for half-a-year at an air depot near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania repairing and building planes as part of the nation's preparedness campaign in the first years of World War II. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he volunteered to go with a group of depot employees to Hawaii where he assembled B-26's for the air campaign in the Pacific. He was drafted while working in Hawaii and served in the military there until the end of the war. Following the war, Harvan served as a photographer in the Army of occupation in Japan.

Harvan's education in photography began in his eighteen months of service in Japan. He ran the Army photo lab and learned to develop film and make prints. He began to take photographs as well. He took pictures of various visiting dignitaries, including Army brass attending a birthday party for the son of the Japanese emperor in the Imperial Palace.

Shooting pictures off base on his own time became Harvan's passion in this period. “It never seemed like I was happy or contented unless I was taking pictures, or out with the camera. I spent all my spare time in Tokyo taking pictures of the people on the street.”[6] In his oral history, he told of trading government-issue cigarettes for his first Rolleiflex camera, showing an inventiveness and a flexibility that would serve him later in his professional career. He described how he began his work as a documentary photographer:

As I had more free time then, I used to walk the streets of Tokyo. I started to photograph the people on the streets. I couldn't get any standard film for the Rolleiflex, but what I would do so I could use the camera was use aerial film. I had some old paper backings—and I would go in the darkroom and I would cut the aerial film into strips, and I would tape the film onto the backing; it was kind of flexible. Aerial film was a little thicker than regular film, but I was able to utilize it, making twelve exposures on the spool. That way I had film for the Rollei. I had film packs for the four by five Speed Graphic, but it was much easier for me to take pictures on the streets with the Rolleiflex, so that I did.[7]

By the time he was discharged from the Army, Harvan knew he wanted to become a photographer. Although the head of the Associated Press bureau in Tokyo offered him the opportunity to remain there as a photographer, Harvan turned the offer down. Heading back to the U.S. he intended to attend photography school in Los Angeles; however, when the school delayed his admission for several months, he took a job as a journalist and photographer for a local newspaper. He never headed out for the beginning of the winter term in Los Angeles.

Early in his newspaper career he covered a sit-down strike in a local mine; almost by chance he found his calling. Covering local events for the paper and conforming to a rigid formula in his photography proved quite limiting and Harvan soon sought the independence of free-lance work. His income now became uncertain but opportunities did come his way. He became friendly with the man who handled public relations for the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company (LC&N) and began getting got frequent jobs in the mines shooting pictures for advertising and annual reports. He gained entrance into the mines that was denied to other photographers, and he used the opportunity to shoot a good many more pictures, and more interesting ones, in the mines than just those he was commissioned to shoot for public relations purposes. His photos captured the miners' skilled work in the massive, multi-level underground operations of a corporation that had been producing anthracite coal for a hundred and thirty years.[8]

With the end of anthracite mining clearly in sight, Harvan began to look for other job possibilities. Once again he made a choice that permitted him to continue documenting underground mining in the Panther Valley. He turned down a job with the National Gallery of Art as a photographer's assistant, even though professionally it provided a real career opportunity. It would have been a wrenching move for his wife and family. When the mines closed and his main free-lance income dried up, he obtained a job in the photography department of Bethlehem Steel, commuting an hour from his home in Lansford. There he found a sympathetic boss who permitted, even encouraged, his own personal photographic work, while he did more conventional photography for the steel giant.

In 1960, Harvan began documenting the Lanscoal Company, a tiny mining operation whose 20 employees were, for the next twelve years, the only remaining underground miners in the Panther Valley. Taking time off from Bethlehem Steel, Harvan donned a hardhat and lamp and walked into the mine to photograph the last remnant of once mammoth mining operations. He caught the men at work, resting during breaks, and sharing beer and song at the end of a hard workweek. The miners came to trust Harvan—he became one of them. He recorded the rhythms of their work, including the final cars of coal that came from the No. 9 mine in June 1972 as the Lanscoal Company closed.

While documenting this last generation of underground anthracite miners was Harvan's passion in these years, he also had a keen interest in the broader world around him. His photography took him beyond the limits of the Pennsylvania anthracite region. The accompanying photographic exhibition offers a sampling of the breadth of Harvan's subjects. He photographed the Amish people, Pennsylvania country auctions, New York City street scenes, mine rescue operations, abandoned anthracite breakers, the Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg, and numerous other subjects in various locations. Documentary photography dominated his work but increasingly he sought expressiveness beyond the realistic depiction of his subjects.

He worked twenty-seven years for Bethlehem Steel, retiring in 1982. These years were also his most productive as a free-lance photographer. Numerous projects kept him on the move, on weekends and during vacations. Increasingly his photographs reached a wider audience, through shows and national publications. Beginning in 1963 he exhibited his work at numerous galleries, museums, and colleges including the Kodak Exhibit Center at Grand Central Station in New York City, the George Eastman House in Rochester, the Kodak Center at the New York World's Fair, the Lehigh University Art Gallery, Eckley Miners' Village, and the Anthracite Heritage Museum in Scranton. Between the late 1950s and 1970s he published photographs in a variety of national magazines including Leica Photography (1958), Saturday Evening Post (1959 and 1960), Life (1963), Stone Magazine (1965), Applied Photography (1967), Nikon World (1969), Travel & Camera (1969), Infinity (1972), and Peterson's Photographic Magazine (1974).

Harvan's choice to stay in the anthracite region gave a continuity to his life and shaped his photography. Remaining in his hometown, close to family and roots, Harvan reflected sentiments that were common to post-war inhabitants of dying mining communities. Many of his miner neighbors turned down job opportunities in southeastern Pennsylvania or northern New Jersey that would have required them to uproot and move to the growing suburbs of Philadelphia or New York City. They chose instead considerable economic insecurity in a coal region that no longer offered mine employment. Harvan was one of the lucky ones to find employment with a major employer—a company that managed to survive beyond his retirement—but clearly he would have had greater professional employment possibilities beyond the region's borders.[9] He stayed with family, ethnic and church ties, in familiar territory, living to this day in half of the two-family house in which he grew up. His professional career and the fate of his hometown and the anthracite region have been inextricably tied together. Because of the choices he made, to remain in Lansford and to pass up more distant professional opportunities, he was able to create a body of documentary photography that otherwise would not exist.[10]

When George Harvan retired his photographic work continued with hardly a perceptible break. Since his regular job never engaged the core of his creative energies and he had always pursued his own documentary projects while employed at Bethlehem Steel, with his retirement Harvan was free to simply concentrate on his own work. Though age and recent chemotherapy treatments for a recurring cancer have slowed his pace, George Harvan continues to take photographs, work in his darkroom, and make prints for local museums and interpretive exhibits. He travels much less today, but still enjoys new challenges in his professional work. Recently he has experimented with Polaroid and pinhole photography and has made circular photographs similar to those produced in an earlier era. He talks about purchasing a personal computer and learning how to use the new photo-editing software that is increasingly a part of photographic art—if his health permits.

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Reflecting on the range of George Harvan's work over a fifty-year period, one is struck first by the respect which he afforded his subjects. There is something uplifting and humanizing about Harvan's treatment of the miners of the Panther Valley. The fortitude, dignity, and self-respect of his subjects are unmistakably communicated in the photographer's work. Yet, at the same time, one senses that these characteristics are forged in loss. Harvan, in his photographs, was clearly drawn to tragedy and loss. Consider the subjects he photographed over the years: the Japanese after their devastating defeat; miners accommodating the closing of the mines; family members coping with the tragedy of mining disasters; families closing up homes and farms as elderly members age or pass away; drama on the battlefield at Gettysburg; the decay of a mannequin with the passage of time; a vision of the world after a nuclear holocaust.

Tragedy and loss, of course, played a major part in Harvan's own life and that of his community. There was the death of his sister Claire in a plane crash when she was only thirty-four, and his brother's early death from Lou Gehrig's disease. The closing of the mines gave tragedy and loss a social dimension—they were not simply emotions one experienced as an individual, but they embraced entire families and whole communities. Yet Harvan's photographs do not dwell on tragedy entirely; the focus on loss provides a way for Harvan to emphasize human strength and resilience. His is a complex view of the human condition, at once tragic and yet full of hope and optimism.

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The Mines

This duality is apparent in the underground mining photos George Harvan took between the late 1940s and the early 1970s, which form the core of his work. His mining photographs divide chronologically into two groups: those of the operations of the LC&N between 1949 and the closing of the its underground mines in 1954, and his treatment of the Lanscoal miners as they worked the No. 9 mine in Lansford between 1960 and 1972. Those two operations offered very different settings for Harvan's work; he developed an intimacy with the last of the Panther Valley miners that he could never have achieved earlier, when the LC&N was engaged in massive operations.

Harvan's interest always focused on the men in the mines rather than either the technology or the product. He said it best in an interview:

I was never really interested in how many cars of coal they put out, or how many feet they had to drill in the vein. I primarily went in a mine there and looked for a certain type of photograph… I was so preoccupied to get a meaningful picture I didn't care what they were actually doing, as long as it was something that was interesting and I could make a photograph. That's all I primarily cared about..[11]

Moreover, Harvan took pictures as he found them, never posing miners for effect. He told their story, not his own. Harvan's integrity was a major element in the trust that developed between him and the miners. Over the years, this trust permitted Harvan to record what went on underground, placing the miners at the center of the story.

The first mining photograph he ever took was for a local newspaper. It shows a group of miners coming out of the cage that had just brought them up from below at the end of a sit-down strike in 1949. Strength and confidence are evident in the men's faces, accentuated by a broad grin on the miner in the front center of the group. Harvan's commitment to tell their story is apparent.

That purpose persisted in the body of photographs Harvan took inside and around the mines of the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company. The images show miners working at the Mammoth Vein, a forty-foot vein of coal that coursed through the valley. The coal dwarfed the men, but they were at ease working at the breast and in the chute. His photos show the range of skills that mineworkers brought to their tasks as well as the intricate division of labor that characterized anthracite mining in its heyday. We see miners, loaders, battery starters, motormen, and a variety of skilled workers underground. All played roles in bringing the black diamonds out to the surface.

These miners, like Harvan, were typically the American-born sons of immigrants from southern, central, and Eastern Europe. Most were about his age or perhaps ten years older. Harvan knew the miners, knew their younger brothers and sisters, and they knew him and his family. He moved easily in the mines and among the men, and his photos caught them at work and relaxing. His camera seemed not to intrude on the scenes it recorded, a phenomenon particularly evident in Harvan's documentation of the Lanscoal Company after 1960.

Since its founding in the 1820s, the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company dominated life in the Panther Valley; by 1920, it employed 8,000 men there—including Harvan's father.[12] The operation George Harvan documented in the early 1950s was only a shadow of its former self, but still it was a complex operation with an intricate hierarchy and division of labor. Harvan had only limited access to the underground mines in these years, able to take pictures only when public relations work took him inside the mines on company business. His photographs revealed the workings of the mine, but there was still something of a distance there between the photographer and his subjects. Harvan could not always pick his locations or the men he photographed; he could not document certain work processes. He did not develop the close connection to the miners that would characterize his later work.

The Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company closed its underground operations in 1954, and thereafter leased its mines to a number of small, local companies. Beginning in 1960, a group of former miners came together and founded the Lanscoal Company. That company, a cooperative of about twenty miners, set about refitting the gangway and chutes at the water level of LC&N's No. 9 mine in Lansford. There, for the next decade, a gradually diminishing workforce blasted coal from veins accessible at that level. Gone now were the multi-level operations, the cage providing access to the lower levels, the intricate division of labor, and massive labor force that had characterized mining at LC&N for fifty years. All the men earned the same consideration wage, $20 a day; and they all took on the varied job assignments that mining called for—they were miners, loaders, laborers, motormen, as the work required.[13]

This small group of men worked the No. 9 mine until the company shut down in June 1972. During this period, George Harvan used all his free time to document the work of the miners; he had free rein to enter the mines, find the men, and record their work. Once he donned a miner's hardhat and lamp and signed in, he was on his own. He photographed the men at work, resting with their lunch pails, showering in the wash shanty, drinking beer and talking at the end of the week's work. A catalog of one of his exhibitions began, appropriately enough, with individual head and shoulder portraits of nine Lanscoal miners attired in their work clothes with hardhat and headlamp. In the history of LC&N such portraits would have been limited to the upper ranks of mine management.[14] Harvan's respect for the men is readily apparent as their eyes meet the camera head on. So is the men's own ease with the photographer. A photo of George Harvan survives from this period. He is wearing a denim jacket and overalls with a hardhat and lamp and holds his 35mm camera. The background is pitch black except for one miner's lamp visible in the distance. Miners and photographer were well matched.

George Harvan was present during the uneven decline of anthracite mining for twenty-five years after World War II. He also recorded scenes around the mines and in mining towns after the closings. A 1955 photo shows the abandoned No. 8 breaker in Coaldale in the distance with row upon row of empty coal cars in the foreground. Another photograph, shot at about the same time, offers a contemporary comment on anthracite's decline in graffiti chalked on a coal car being used as a dumpster: “Go west young man. No future here.” and “Valley shot to hell!” While the graffiti spoke to hard times, it also revealed its author's rebellion in the face of hardship. Whoever chalked those comments on the coal car did not passively accept the fate inherent in mining's demise. Harvan had the skill and prescience to capture what he saw around him and to record the desolation with clarity and understatement.

In the decades after the mines closed Harvan continued to record life in dying coal towns. Several of his photos depict the blocked-off entrance of the No. 9 mine—the same mine he documented in such detail when it was in operation between 1960 and 1972—showing the debris and overgrown weeds that built up with the passage of time. In his documentation of surviving coal breakers, he told a similar story. One can see right through the rusting hulk of the Locust Summit breaker in a 1994 photo that shows Joe Lawson, the lone remaining employee of the Reading Anthracite company, walking across the coal yard in front of the breaker. The massive structure that once employed hundreds of men and produced thousands of tons of coal every day was empty now, save for a tiny operation bagging coal for use in aquariums and water filters. The gray day, the decaying breaker, and one man's reflection in a puddle convey the hopelessness of a building and an industry that have outlived their usefulness.

Yet Harvan's photographs are by no means unrelentingly depressing. The same day he photographed Joe Lawson walking in front of the decaying breaker, he also took a picture of Joe seated at the bottom of a conveyor belt, bringing coal from the bagging plant. Here we see Lawson not as a tiny, faceless figure dwarfed by the massive breaker, but as an engaging human being who took pride in himself and his work. Harvan captured one man's resilience in the midst of truly catastrophic economic circumstances.

As Harvan worked to document those interviewed for the oral history collection, When the Mines Closed (published in 1998 by Cornell University Press), he found himself taking photographs of eighty-year-old veterans of the region's mines and garment factories, many of whom he had known for forty or fifty years. He recorded Gabe Ferrence in 1978 in front of a dragline shovel at the Springdale strippings. Wearing dark glasses, hard hat, an open plaid shirt and sturdy work boots, Ferrence displays the pride and self-confidence one hears in his voice as he describes how he made the giant drag-line machine do his bidding.[15] Seventeen years later, Harvan photographed Ferrence, then retired, with one foot raised on the caterpillar tread of the diesel shovel he had collected on his farm. In this second photo Ferrence didn't carry the weight of his earlier years, but he still had the same slight smile and confident gaze. Moreover, he had liked his work enough to bring a discarded diesel shovel into his backyard as a reminder of the good times.

Harvan's long-term contact with and intimate knowledge of the people of the Panther Valley helped him produce graphic images that humanized and emphasized his subjects' agency. He took photographs of one deep miner, Mike Sabron, for forty years. They include photos of Sabron in a mine car, climbing up a chicken ladder into a chute, operating the boards that control the flow of coal into waiting cars below, and singing with his mining buddies after work. More recently he photographed Sabron with a younger miner cleaning up the No. 9 mine to restore it for use as a tourist attraction. Although suffering from black lung disease, Sabron maintained an active life into his mid-80s and Harvan recorded his warmth, energy, and exuberance, revealing a person who, though not wealthy, has lived a rich life.[16] Sabron, like Harvan, turned down job opportunities that would have taken him away from the anthracite region; he valued and enjoyed a life in which family, friends, church, and community were central. Harvan shared the same core values that enabled his neighbors to survive, even thrive, in the face of economic decline; because of this he was able to capture what was best in the culture of the anthracite region.

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1. Mary Panzer, Matthew Brady and the Image of History (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997); Benson J. Lossing, Matthew Brady's Illustrated History of the Civil War (New York: Fairfax Press, 1977; originally published in 1912); Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York, with a new preface by Charles A. Madison (New York: Dover, 1971; originally published in 1901); Maren Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890-1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); America and Lewis Hine: Photographs, 1904-1940, foreword by Walter Rosenblum, biographical notes by Naomi Rosenblum, and essay by Alan Trachtenberg (New York: Aperture, 1977); Carl Fleischhauer and Beverly W. Brannan, eds., Documenting America, 1935-1943 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).
2. Earl Dotter, In Mine and Mill (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1979); Matthew Witt and Earl Dotter, In Our Blood (New Market, Tenn.: Highlander Research and Education Center, 1979); Portraits in Steel, photographs by Milton Rogovin, interviews by Michael Frisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Bill Bamberger and Cathy N. Davidson, Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998).
3. George Harvan, "Witness to a Closing," in George Harvan, The Coal Miners of Panther Valley (Easton, Penn.: Canal History and Technology Press, 1998; originally published in 1995), p. 11. For the full text, see "Witness" Harvan's description of his commitment to record the lives of miners reminds one of the perspective of the anthropologist, Oscar Lewis. See La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York (New York: Random House, 1966).
4. Interview 1. All citations to the interview transcripts that follow provide links to the actual locations of the quotations in question.
5. Interview 2.
6. Interview 2.
7. Interview 2.
8. For a thoughtful account of the last years of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company from the point of view of the president of its coal mining subsidiary, see W. Julian Parton, The Death of a Great Company: Reflections on the Decline and Fall of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company (Easton, Penn.: Canal History and Technology Press, 1998; originally published in 1986).
9. For an article which explores migration and persistence in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania and places George Harvan's individual choices within a broader context, see Thomas Dublin, "Working-class Families Respond to Industrial Decline: Migration from the Pennsylvania Anthracite Region since 1920," International Labor and Working Class History, 54 (Fall 1998), 40-56.
10. For examples of the thinking of other men and women from the anthracite region faced with similar choices, see Thomas Dublin, When the Mines Closed: Stories of Struggles in Hard Times, photographs by George Harvan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).
11. Interview 4.
12. For a brief treatment of this history, see Thomas Dublin, "Two Hundred Years in the Panther Valley," in Harvan, Coal Miners of Panther Valley, pp. 5-10.
13. The best discussion of work at Lanscoal comes from the oral history of one of its miners, Mike Sabron. See Dublin, When the Mines Closed, pp. 41-65.
14. It is telling evidence of George Harvan's catholic approach to preserving mining's history in the Panther Valley that he is currently photographing and digitizing a collection of portraits of managers of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company held by the No. 9 Mine Museum in Lansford.
15. See Dublin, When the Mines Closed, pp. 163-83.
16. For fuller elaboration, see Dublin, When the Mines Closed, pp. 41-65; Thomas Dublin and George Harvan, "When the Mines Closed: One Worker's Oral History," Labor's Heritage, 9:4 (Spring 1998), 46-59.

Thomas Dublin

George Harvan

Dublin: This is Tom Dublin and it's the twenty-ninth of May, and I'm with George Harvan at 307 West Patterson Street in Lansford, [Pennsylvania] beginning a series of interviews about his growing up, his coming to photography, and his photographic career over the years. So, George, why don't you tell me when you were born?

Harvan: Tom, I was born on February the twenty-fifth, 1921, right here in Lansford, on East Kline Avenue. At a place called Porvaznik's. My mother and father came from Europe. They had nowhere to go, they knew about the Porvaznik family on East Kline Avenue, and they rented a place up there. In the meantime, I had three sisters—Julia, Margaret, and Rose. So I was the fourth in the family.

Dublin: You were the young one.

Harvan: At that time.

Dublin: Tell me a little bit about your father.

Harvan: My father's name was Andrew. He came to this country right after World War I. He was married at the time. He came with my mother, and my three older sisters who were born in Czechoslovakia. When they came to this country, a lot of the immigrants migrated to the coal fields to find work. He came to Lansford and started to work in the coal mines. He worked at the Greenwood Colliery right from the beginning, Number Ten Colliery.

Dublin: And where in Czechoslovakia had he come from?

Harvan: There was a small town call Kudloce, K-u-d-l-o-c-e, something like that. It's near Bratislava. It's close to the Austria-Hungary border. They had more ties to that region than to the East Czechs, you know, to the Moravians or the Bohemians. In fact, a lot of the people in Lansford came from that village. I guess it was familiarity, so that when they came here they came from that village, almost to another village.

Dublin: Now when your father came, did he come the very first time with his wife and daughters?

Harvan: Oh yes, the first time.

Dublin: The whole group of five.

Harvan: No, no, I wasn't born yet.

Dublin: The rest of the family.

Harvan: Oh, I'm sorry. The five, yeah, the five. When they came here, my father started to work in the mines. In 1920, he was in a very violent explosion. His buddy was killed. They were firing a shot, I guess it was the manway they were firing from, and his buddy was out in the chute, exposed more to the blast, and my father was behind some timbers. His buddy was just blown away. My father was so badly injured, they never thought he would live. He had thousands and thousands of black and blue marks all through his body, just from the force of the blast. It was like a tattoo, where the coal dirt had blown into his skin. He never liked the mines after that. He didn't feel comfortable in there. The accident happened in '20. And in 1921 I was born, and the following year he decided he didn't want to mine anymore, so he packed up the whole family—wife, four kids, I was one year old—and went back to Czechoslovakia. He had saved a few bucks from mining and through compensation from being injured, with the little bit he had, he always wanted to own a little inn. So we went back to Czechoslovakia, and he had a chance to buy a little inn, and he bought it.

Dublin: He bought the inn in the town that you had mentioned, where he had come from?

Harvan: Yes, in that area. It was in that same area. And he was having a grand time. They would have dances there, and my mother was doing all the work, cooking, and the kids were helping. Julia, at the time, was probably about ten, eleven. Margaret was about eight. Now Rose was about four. There was about three years difference between the three girls. They remembered the time very well. They remembered Czechoslovakia and they often commented that I was a big kid. I was pretty big when I was born, and they said I would plonk down in the middle of one of those dirt streets in Czechoslovakia and they couldn't get me up. So, after being there about a year, my mother didn't like it. My mother didn't like it at all. She probably didn't like all that was going on in the inn and all the work.

Dublin: What was your mother's name again?

Harvan: My mother's name was Anna Sabol. Her father had come to this country and he worked down south somewhere. It was in North Carolina, and he earned a lot of money. With the money saved, he decided to go back to Czechoslovakia and buy a house and start a business. But when he got off the train and was walking down a road, he was waylaid and was murdered—when he still had the money on his person. [Portion deleted--one question] My mother was a young woman at the time, and she was in Czechoslovakia at the time, and of course, when she found out about the killing, well, this really turned her off—living in Czechoslovakia, having your father murdered there and everything. She wanted to come back to Lansford. Margaret wanted to come back real bad—she was the second oldest. Julia didn't particularly care. Rose was a darling little girl who everybody liked. The people in town liked her. But I think all they wanted was to come back, so finally my father reluctantly sold the place, and came back to Lansford. I was a little over one year old, and my parents packed up the whole family again and put them back on a train and boat and came back to Lansford.

Dublin: So you went back and forth across the Atlantic twice before you were about one and a half.

Harvan: Two years old, yeah. In fact, we still have the trunk up in the attic that they used to move all their clothes from Czechoslovakia to here. It was a big steamer trunk. But you can imagine, not having that much money and all that, and then the passage must have been kind of difficult in those days, with four kids, six people.

Dublin: So he must have saved a fair amount of money to be able to afford the return passage and then to buy this inn?

Harvan: Yeah, sure, he must have. But, a lot of those people were very thrifty. They did save money and they lived simply—how they did it, I don't know. But they did make two passages across the Atlantic. I don't know much about it because I was too young. But my sisters did—Rose—who became a photographer —often mentioned how the Captain liked her, and they'd get a lot of favors. She got extra food.

Dublin: Do you think the family went over and back in steerage or do you think you went in a cabin?

Harvan: I don't know. It's hard to say.

Dublin: One thing that's interesting about this story is that it sounds like, from your description of your father's accident, that he was already a miner, which would seem to me to be unusual.

Harvan: No, he wasn't a miner. The fellow who was killed was a miner—he was his buddy. He was his helper. And I guess the miners took more chances. Not more chances, but they expose themselves to more dangers, than his buddy, he was probably an older man. My father was able to get behind a timber. It probably saved his life. He didn't get the full force of the blast.

Dublin: Do you sense that he was recovering for quite a while after that accident?

Harvan: Yes, he did recover a long time. I imagine, in those days, they didn't have that much unemployment money coming in, you did it all on your own.

Dublin: It sounds like you think the company made some sort of payment to him as compensation.

Harvan: I think so. They did.

Dublin: Now when the family came back to Lansford, did he return to the mines?

Harvan: Yes, he did. He came back and started to work in Number 10, and eventually became a contract miner, too. He worked there until he retired when he was sixty-five. Of course he had black lung real bad then, too. But he worked through the years, through all the good and bad times. He never did anything else. That's all he did was contract mining. My father had two other brothers in Czechoslovakia at the time—Mike and John—Mike was next to him, and John was the youngest in the family. He brought both of them over to this country. They married here. They lived with my parents until they got married. My mother took care of them—they boarded with her. They also worked in the mines, and raised families here in Lansford. Mike had about five or six kids, and John had four boys—no girls.

Dublin: Do you have memories of yourself with these uncles when you were young?

Harvan: Oh, sure. In fact, John used to always cut my hair. Well, when you visit from one mining family to another, the first thing they do when you come into a house is they give you a shot, a shot of whiskey. Also, my father made wine, and he'd bring some wine for guests. This one particular time I remember my father gave John a little bit too much to drink, and then he started cutting my hair. Well, he made a mess of it. The next day, he remembered he had to cut my hair, and he come down. My mother said, "Why are you here John"" He said, "Well, I have to cut George's hair." "You cut it yesterday." Well, in the meantime, after he cut my hair, my mother had to recut it and had to take it all off! John was the family barber. Mike was a little different than my father or John. He was very quiet, never spoke very much. He almost always seemed like he was mad at somebody. But it was just his way—he was all right.

Dublin: So what was your father like as you were growing up?

Harvan: Well, he never much bothered with the rest of us. He stayed more or less to himself. He did try to educate himself. He read a lot, and he would buy different periodicals. Of course, they also had the Slovak books. He did learn how to speak English. In time, he also learned how to write. All on his own. My mother never really learned how to write. Toward the latter part of her life, she would try to read the daily paper, but she never really learned how to write. But in time she could pick out things in the newspaper. When I was growing up, my parents only spoke Slovak among themselves. Margaret was more of the home type of person—she spoke Slovak very well. Julia never did. When she got out of high school, she went to New York and she never came back to live in Lansford. My parents never encouraged us to speak Slovak at home. They felt we should speak English and learn the customs here—and get an education here. So they encouraged us to speak English in home. But when they talked among themselves, it was always in Slovak.

Dublin: And what church did they and you attend?

Harvan: St. Michael's church. My father wasn't much of a churchgoer back then. He had a little rebellious streak in him, too. I mentioned this just recently —when I talked with Rose a few years ago, just before she died, and I said, "Rose, what would have happened to us if we would have stayed in Europe and never came back to the United States?" She said, "George, Hitler would have killed your father, or somebody would have killed him because he was always finding something to rebel about." So when it came time to—the church had the practice then to take money off your pay-check for church dues—and my father didn't like that. He didn't like that at all. He thought that was something that they shouldn't do. So he had it out with the priest, and the priest insisted on taking it out, so my father said, well, I'm not going to go to church. So what the priest was saying was that if you're a member of the congregation, we're going to do this. We're going to take this out of your pay.

Dublin: And so he said, "You're not."

Harvan: That's right. This kind of devastated my mother, because she wanted to go to church. And she would go. After a while, I don't think he paid dues into the church.

Dublin: So in some ways, she might have felt not welcome there because he was making this stand.

Harvan: That's right. She felt a little more strongly about being a Catholic than my father did, and she made us go. We never went to parochial school. We always went to public school. And she made us go after school to get instructions for communion and confirmation and all that.

Dublin: And were you confirmed?

Harvan: Yes, we had to go after school. In fact, Sister Methodia—remember her? She was the one that taught me. She taught everybody in town.

Dublin: Was she the principal of this school, or just a teacher there?

Harvan: She was just a teacher. But it seemed everybody my age, who went to St. Michael's, was taught by her. She lived to be almost a hundred.

Dublin: But she just taught you in the after-school program?

Harvan: Right, yeah, it was after school. And that's why we were never really—like some Catholic families who observed a lot of things, the ceremonies of the church and things like that. My father—he just broke away. I don't know if he ever went to church again. I don't remember him ever going to church.

Dublin: So when you were confirmed, your mother would have been there.

Harvan: Yeah, she was there. They had a priest by the name of Father Lisitsky—who was very strict, he was almost dictatorial in his dealings with the people, and my father didn't get along, that's all.

Dublin: So your father resented that kind of authority.

Harvan: That's right. And that's just the type of a person he was.

Dublin: He probably felt he had enough of that kind of authority from the mine already.

Harvan: Yeah, either that, or maybe just his make-up, too. He was a strong union man. He believed in the union very strongly, but other than that, he never went out... trying to organize people or things like that. But I think he realized that the union was a good thing for the miners—in those days, it was a good thing.

Dublin: So did you ever go into a mine when you were very young? Did he take you in? What's your first memory of being in a mine?

Harvan: Actually, the first memory of me being in a mine was after I come out of the service, and I went down into the mines to take pictures for the coal company. The only other experience I had in the mine was when I was growing up —ten, eleven years old—I did have to pick coal and fill the coal bin up. We would go up Courtwright Street, all the way up to the top of the mountain, practically where Philip Ginter discovered coal, where the vein outcropped on Sharp Mountain.

Dublin: Now is that actually in Summit Hill?

Harvan: Well, I don't think it was in Summit Hill. It was just here southeast of Lansford— Sharp Mountain. There was places where a small vein would outcrop, and if you could find these veins, you could mine the coal. Pig it out, crack it, put it in bags, put it in a wheelbarrow, haul it down Courtwright Street, and dump it into the coal bin of this house, right here where we're sitting now—right underneath us.

Dublin: So how old would you have been when you did that?

Harvan: Well, I was in high school. I was twelve years old, thirteen maybe. My job was to fill the coal bin every summer. I mean, it had to be filled right up the rafters. I couldn't get another piece of coal in there.

Dublin: And did your family basically get all of its coal that way?

Harvan: Yeah, that's how we heated our house, and I had to make sure there was no slate along with the coal—it had to be all coal. If ever a piece of slate got caught in the grates and they couldn't rake the stove, I would get it! But I was pretty good at that. I knew what slate was, and what coal was.

Dublin: Did your sisters ever do that, too, or just you, as the boy?

Harvan: They picked coal, but they didn't go up to the veins. They went down to the R.R. track, where the coal would spill off the trains, and they would pick it up there. My buddy was a fellow by the name of Bill "Bozo" Krycirik, from down here on Snyder Avenue, about four years older than I was. He was kind of a physical specimen. He had big muscles—a health nut. The first thing he did in the morning, in the summer, was to take his shirt off. He had this coal hole up on the mountain, and he would let me work along the fringes of it. We were down about twelve or fifteen feet on the pitch. He would carry the coal up for me, and I would crack it and put it in bins. He kinda took me under his wing, and I was his buddy. He would get two or three times more coal than I would, since he was bigger, strong, and knew more about it. He would also sell coal. After he would fill his coal bin, then he would contact the people in the neighborhood. Some of the widows—he would sell a bag of coal for a quarter.

Dublin: So would you normally take burlap bags up there?

Harvan: Yes, we used burlap bags to hold the coal. We would have screens, hammers, picks, etc.— and everything else—to crack and screen the coal. We would never take the real small coal, it would go through the screens. We only took what mostly was the size of a chestnut type, or an egg coal. That's all we would take—the rest we would leave up there.

Dublin: And you had some sort of a hammer? A sledge?

Harvan: Oh yeah, we had big hammers for the big lumps. And then the smaller hammer to break it down to the smaller pieces. There was no sense in taking the fine coal —you couldn't burn it—so we left it up there. We only took what we could use. It was good coal because it came right out of a vein—solid vein.

Dublin: So you did this in the summer?

Harvan: Yes.

Dublin: And about how much time in the summer would it take to eventually do this?

Harvan: It was every morning —all through high school. My father—he was kinda strict. If it was raining and I couldn't get up to screen the coal, when it was too bad —he would have other things for you to do. When huckleberry season came in, and the blackberry season come in—he handed you the can and he said, "Look, go pick huckleberries." So, all summer, every morning was taken up, either with coal, huckleberries, or blackberries, or later on, mushrooms, or whatever it was. But you had to go out. You couldn't sit around. You couldn't sleep until ten or eleven o'clock, that's for sure.

Dublin: And would you say that was probably common for other kids your age? Other families?

Harvan: I would say so. As I think about it, though, some of the other kids didn't have it quite so tough. I think there was a little more leeway in certain things they did. But, I guess it didn't hurt.

Dublin: It certainly got you a bit familiar with mining, in a way.

Harvan: Yeah, and the discipline, too. As far as you had to do certain things, and that was it. But then my afternoons were my own. I would come home after dumping the coal, and my mother would pour water into an old wooden tub where I would wash. We had a bathroom at the time, she would still pour water into the old tub. I was about ten or eleven when we had a bathroom put in upstairs. Up until that time we had an outhouse in the back, we had running water but we didn't have a bathroom—when my father remodeled the house and he put in the bathroom.

Dublin: Now this is a two-family house?

Harvan: Yes, it is. We lived here, right where we're sitting. This home, at one time, was a single house. And it's a very old house, because all of the beams underneath, there's no nails in them. They're all mortised. It belonged to a Frederick Evans, who was an engineer for the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company. And at that time, on the 1870 map, there's only one house in this block, and that's this house. Later on, it was made into two houses. When my father bought the property, he made it into two houses and then when he was remodeling and all that, he put a bathroom in the other side, and they rented the other side out. That's where I live now—on the other side.

Dublin: And this half-house has how many bedrooms upstairs?

Harvan: Three bedrooms and a bath. Three small bedrooms and a bath, and an attic. And, of course, the basement. And the same thing on the other side. The three girls shared one bedroom and my mother and father shared one, and I had—being the boy—had the other. I knew a lot of times, if my mother would be sick or something like that, my father would use a bed next to me, we had two beds there—in the same bedroom. Julia graduated from Lansford High —Margaret also graduated, and so did Rose, and I graduated. And just as soon as Julia graduated, she went off to New York—went to Greenwich Village and never came back—stayed there until she died.

Dublin: What kind of work did she do in New York when she first went there?

Harvan: Oh, she was a pretty good artist. She had an artistic bent—there was something there—she worked in factories and places where she hand-painted ties and scarves. She did some design work. Then she married a fellow by the name of Marvel, Frankie Marvel, and they had three children. He practically drank himself to death—died an alcoholic. She lived alone, and when she was sixty-seven, one of her friends found her, she had died in her little apartment in Greenwich village. It wasn't much. One summer I went down to see her, and I couldn't believe the small place she was living in. I tried to get her to come back to Lansford, but there was no way she was going to come back here. She got so used to the city and the way people lived and she was not ready to come back here—never did. The only time she came back was when I buried her here.

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Dublin: What about your second sister?

Harvan: Margaret, like I said, was more of the home type girl. She went to New York for a while, didn't like it, and came home. She was close to my mother. They would bake together, would wash clothes together, and everything else. She stayed around here, worked in the factory, met a fellow down the street here called Frankie Sulek, who worked in Number Six. He was a pretty good musician and always felt that he should be leading a band or something like that, writing music. He did start up a little band, and he called it the Frankie Shaw Orchestra. Where I live now—that's Margaret and her family. Margaret and her family. where they lived—my mother and father lived here and Margaret lived next door. He would bring in about five or six people and they would start playing, and he would sit up at night after work, making arrangements. He had the orchestra for a while, up until the war broke out. He wasn't a young man anymore, but he wanted to get into the Service and stayed for two years, and then following the Service, they went to Levittown, New York [and then] they moved to North Carolina; he was writing technical manuals and instructional books. They bought a plot of ground and built a home on it. Frank died a young man—he was only sixty-one. He was out in the yard, out in the back yard one Saturday afternoon, raking the leaves, and just dropped over. That was it. Margaret was a widow from then on.

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Dublin: Now, were you closest to Rose?

Harvan: I would say so, yeah, because she was three years older than me, and especially toward the latter part of her life when I was retired I had more time myself. I didn't have to spend as much time with my children—they were gone—so I could readily drive up to Connecticut where she had a home, a nice place. I enjoyed going up there. It was great—I miss it now—even today I miss it. We were very close toward the end. . . . When Rose was in high school, she also had to work. So, during the evenings and during her vacations— junior and senior year—she got a job with Dr. Breslin here—at Lansford with our dentist. He kind of liked her, so he said, "You can be my assistant. If I need something, you can hand it to me." Things of that nature. She did that for a couple years, but as soon as she got out of high school, she also wasn't going to stay in town, and left. Depression-era Lansford. Courtesy Library of Congress. Depression-era Lansford. Courtesy Library of Congress. There was nothing here during the Depression. My father wasn't working—most of the time. I could remember the Depression was . . . taking a pot and getting it filled with soup. Even shoes, there was a bunch of shoes thrown on a pile, and someone would say, "Go pick out a pair." You'd try to find a pair that fit you. And going up to the grocery stores like the A&P, they would throw lettuce out, and oranges and apples, you cut out some of the bad parts. I remember doing all that, and bringing home some of the good. We had chickens in the back. And what we couldn't eat—the bad lettuce and all that —we gave to the chickens. My mother would kill the chickens and that's how we survived. We had a garden in the back, too. We had carrots, tomatoes, and things like that. My mother was a good cook. Well, most of the people that came from the old country were good cooks. She could make a meal out of just potatoes or something like lettuce. She'd get a bunch of lettuce out of the back yard and make a sauce with milk and butter and browned it. That was your meal in the evening. Or you'd get a dish of buttermilk. And she'd make a big bowl of mashed potatoes and put it in the middle of the table, and there'd be browned onions in it. You'd scoop the potatoes with a spoon and dip it into the buttermilk, and that was your evening meal. But we always had apples and things like that in the basement. You could always go down there and get an apple. The farmers came to the front of the house here, selling apples and other fruit. So we did eat well. It wasn't expensive—the food— but we never went hungry, that's for sure. Oh, getting back to Rose. She got this job as a dental assistant with Dr. Breslin, and when she got out of high school, she headed for New York City also. When she got to New York, I don't know how it came about— she never talked about it too much—but someone talked her into going to Spain with the Lincoln Brigade, as an ambulance driver/helper. So she packs up, no one knew it. My parents didn't know it. My mother would have been devastated. She winds up in Spain, in the Civil War between Franco and the loyalists. In order to hide her identity where she was, she would send letters to a friend in New York City, who would mail the letter from New York City to Lansford. She didn't want . . . my parents to know where she was—she was just nineteen or twenty years old. She would write a personal letter like she was writing it from New York City, and send it to somebody in New York. She would say, "I'm doing this in New York." It wasn't very often, but every now and then, my mother would mention getting a letter from Rose.

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Rose got involved in this Civil War in Spain as a very, very young girl. When she was in Spain she met people like Hemingway and Robert Capa— people who were involved in that effort. While she was there, she met Herbert Kline, a young filmmaker from Iowa, who was making a documentary film. She got to helping him. And after a while they married. When they finished the film in Spain, they came back to the United States, and when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, they had decided to make a documentary film there called "The Crisis." They spent a year in the Sudetenland, making this film. And they had a lot of good experiences. It was, at this time, that she decided she was going to start doing some still photography also. When she decided to do this, she used an old Rolleicord. They didn't have too much trouble in the Sudetenland until the latter part of the film, because the Germans at that time were kind of looking for publicity for their cause. Hitler was trying to get his message across all over the world, and [the Nazis] were receptive to a filmmaker making a documentary. They could only do certain things, shoot certain places, rallies, and things like that—group meetings. But toward the end of the year, when they started to get into the meat of the film, then it started to get a little bad for them. But by that time, the shooting was finished, and they came back to New York City, edited it, and it showed as a documentary called "The Crisis." Well, they weren't satisfied with that, so they decided the next year to go to Poland in 1940. And you know what happened in Poland. That was the start of the World War II. It was much different in Poland. They were under attack by the Germans, and different counter-people in Poland. The most vivid story she told me was when they had all the shot film in cans, and couldn't get out across the border—didn't know how they were going to get this film out. They finally found somebody sympathetic to what they were doing, and he decided one night that he would put them in a hay wagon and cover them up with hay along with their film, find a remote crossing across the border into, I think it was Lithuania. . . . one of those little roads. And when they were stopped, and I guess whoever stopped them just thought it was a load of hay—they never did search the wagon. They got across the border, and that's how they got their film out of Poland after Hitler invaded Poland and started World War II. Then they came back, and that documentary was called "Lights Out in Europe." It's still available, I imagine, someplace. Then the following year, that was 1941, just before we got into the war, they decided to do a movie in Mexico, and I think you saw some of those pictures. That film was called "A Forgotten Village," written by John Steinbeck. John Steinbeck also wrote the script. Rose did the still pictures, and Herbert and his crew did the documentary film, which is still available. I have a couple books here.

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The story of "The Forgotten Village" was a story about a little boy who was kind of torn between—he wasn't a young boy, he was a young man —about eighteen. Torn between the old customs of a village and how they treated diseases like you could get from drinking water or eating bad food or exposed to bad sewage or something like that. Through a teacher he found out that there were a lot of these elements that were causing the various diseases, and he tried to impress on his father and on the other people in the village that they were treating these illnesses the wrong way, and that they should adopt modern medicines and all that, instead of listening to witch doctors, putting eggs on your stomach or snake skins on your skin, or something—to draw out the pain. So he was torn between thism . . . And in the final scenes, the people reject all his findings, and his father turns his back on him, and the boy has to leave the village. The people went back to what they had been doing. They rejected the modern medicine. And that was the basic message of the story. [deletion]

[Later in her life Rose Harvan wrote a novel based on the story of the Molly Maguires, a secret Irish American group that emerged in the anthracite region in the 1860s and '70s. George did some research at area libraries to help his sister learn more about their history. In the process he learned about the Mollies' trials. Several came from Lansford and lived just up the hill from George's home.]

When we were growing up, we had a lot of big families around here —a lot of ethnic families, mostly Slovak, Polish. And I would go up on Ridge Street and we'd play. At night we'd play all kinds of games or just hang out. And we used to play right in front of the house where Alexander Campbell lived and John Jones lived. Alexander Campbell was the one who was hanged for the murder of John Jones, and we actually played right in front of their homes, because they lived across the street from each other. We were living in this kind of historical place, as far as the Molly Maguires were concerned, and we never even knew it. Like I said, we had a lot of big families around here. And we all had nicknames. Everybody had a nickname. I was called Joe-Joe, I was called Sheriff. And we had Dula, and Moony, and Tilly, and Bunser. They're practically all gone now.

Dublin: Did a lot of those kids go into the mines?

Harvan: No, because we were about the age when—we got out of high school—the mines were not hiring—but then the war broke out, and you went into the service. If you were in the mines and were drafted, you got your job when you came back. They gave your job back. I never went into the mines because when I got out of high school, I couldn't get a job in the mines. I couldn't get a job anywhere. Every week I would go down—Roosevelt had initiated the Civilian Conservation Corps—a program set up for youth to get them off the streets and put them into camps to do some good—planting trees or building roads or whatever. Every week we had to go down to Jim Thorpe, which was Mauch Chunk at the time, and sign up. If you missed a week, they would take you off the list. So you had to bum a ride down there, or get a ride somehow, and sign up every week.

Dublin: And this was just a waiting list?

Harvan: A waiting list, yeah. They would try to take the people who they felt were more deserving, so when your turn came up, they called you and I signed up for a six month period. I spent two years in the Civilian Conservation Corps, that was my employment. We got a dollar a day, thirty dollars a month. You kept eight dollars and twenty-two dollars went home. And that twenty-two dollars was a big help to my parents at home. You're talking '38, '39—well, '39 . . .

Dublin: Your father wasn't working much in the mines?

Harvan: No. No one was. They were just making it. The mines at that time were pretty well finished. The only thing that really rejuvenated mining was the second World War. That was just an interlude, and the rest was just a carry-over from the '39s and '40s into the '47s, or '55s or '56s, and '57s. But that's how I got into the CC's.

Dublin: Where did you do your work? Were you living at home and doing it around here?

Harvan: Oh, no. They packed you off and they put you on a train and they send you to a camp. They sent me down to Waynesboro, PA. It's west of Gettysburg, but more on the border of Maryland and Pennsylvania. There was two camps there. There was a forestry camp, and a SCS camp, which was a soil conservation camp. I was in the soil conservation camp. We went out to different farmers who needed terraces made, or maybe they had blocked off a pasture for cattle—and we'd put up a fence. It was real hard work, but you were young then. You'd get out there in the summertime, with all that heat. They fed you, gave you clothes. We had three good meals. We had breakfast, and then we'd get in the truck, and they'd move us out to a farm or wherever we were going to work—and then during the day's work . . . . At lunch time, they'd have a truck come out with huge vats of food. You had a regular mess kit, and they would scoop the food into it, and you'd eat it. They had coffee and bread. I did that for a year and half. I worked my way up. After a year, I became an assistant leader, and I got $36 a month, and I was able to keep $12, or $14. And then the last six months I was in the CC camps I became a leader. They sent me to New Cumberland. It's a small town south of Harrisburg. It was kind of a replacement center for new CC recruits. But by that time, people were losing interest in the CCs. I'm talking '41—the latter part of '40, '41. My job there was to take rookies to various camps—I was just a young man at the time. I was only twenty years old. So here I was taking young men to other camps. I remember going down to Camp David now, the CCs were building that camp—where the President now retreats—and Front Royal and down into Kentucky and Maryland. I picked them up in New Cumberland, put them on the train, and go to a camp, and I would drop them off, and then come back. It was quite an experience for a young man—to see the country and meet all kinds of people. And you would meet all kinds. One time we got this bunch of kids in from South Philadelphia. Most of them were Italians, you know, really rough. Oh brother, it was tough. But I was fortunate. The leader of the group and I became good friends. He could have clobbered me because he was so much bigger and tougher—but I became good friends with him, and that way I survived, I think. I think that you have to be a little diplomatic. That's another thing I learned. Another interesting thing that happened in the CC camps. There was another fellow from Philadelphia, an Italian boy also, who—he was a leader at the time when I was an assistant leader. He said, "You know, we could make some extra money." And I said, "How's that?" And he said, "I'm going to buy two small pigs. We're going to make a pen back in the woods and feed them all the slop out of the mess hall. We're going to take the slop up there and feed them, then we're going to have these two big pigs. We could take them into town and sell them and make some money." After a while, we had the two biggest pigs you'd ever want to see, because they had all this food that was leftover from the mess hall. And they were huge! They were so big—we got a truck and took them into town. The people in Waynesboro never really liked us, because we were so close to town. It was kind of—I can now understand almost—not quite how the Blacks feel, being an outcast in a town— they wouldn't have nothing to do with us. On Saturday night, we would never head for Waynesboro. We'd go to Hagerstown, which was further away. It was a little bigger town; they had dances and accepted us. After we had our bottle of wine, we didn't care where we were. [laughs] Well, we took these two pigs into town, to a butcher in Waynesboro, but we couldn't get anything for them. They knew we were CC boys—we couldn't get much for the pigs, so they practically stole the pigs from us. [laughs] We didn't make any money anyway.

Thomas Dublin

George Harvan

Dublin: So, George, when we spoke yesterday, you told me about your three older sisters. And now, why don't you tell me about your younger sister and younger brother as well.

Harvan: As I mentioned yesterday, I had three older sisters: Julia, Margaret, and Rose. They were spaced about three years -- between each birth. My younger sister was Claire, who also graduated from high school, became a nurse, went to New York City, worked in Mt. Sinai Hospital, in the cancer center. In those days, cancer was kind of almost a new disease, so she decided to get into that field of work when she became a nurse. She also treated a number of local people, some who even came from Lansford. In one case -- Mr. Sam Weiss -- a local merchant up on Ridge Street -- had a son, Joseph, who developed throat cancer, and they sent him to Mt. Sinai. Claire more or less adopted him there, and took care of him, as a nurse would do. Mr. Weiss would always tell my mother, "Look, anytime you need any clothes, you come up to the store and take anything you want." Claire was a very nice person. When my mother developed cataracts in her eyes, she decided to come back and take care of my mother when she was going through her operation, which was in Coaldale Hospital. During the course of her taking care of my mother -- after the operation which was performed by Dr. Houser, from Tamaqua. He noticed this young woman, taking care of her mother, this after he had just lost his wife. He saw this beautiful girl and became very attracted to her -- started courting her -- eventually they got married and she moved to Tamaqua, where they had a big home. He also had an airplane and liked to fly. He had two daughters. I would say one was in her late teens, and the other in her early twenties. The younger girl, after she got out of high school, decided to become a stewardess. One day, he had an operation to perform but the youngest girl had to be in New York to take a test, and fill out forms for this stewardess job. A friend of his, a Mr. Christman from Palmerton, was to pilot the plane, so the three of them -- Mr. Christman, my sister, and her stepdaughter, flew to New York. She had the interview, and on the way back, while trying to land at the Lehighton Airport, for some reason, the pilot never made the landing field. He hit a cement building at the edge, both my sister and Mr. Christman were killed, the girl was severely injured. Claire was only thirty-four at the time. And it kind of devastated my mother. She used to sit on the back porch here and cry every night. They were very close, and when she died a few years later, she died of a broken heart, just on account of that accident. She was very sentimental, but subjugated to my father. I think I mentioned, before about how the men kind of dominated the women. I think that was the case here. The women were more or less afraid to do many things on their own. If it was all right with the men, they did it. It's still the case around here. I notice a lot of people my age, where the men still dominate the women, more or less.

Dublin: Can you recall some examples, some incidents, from your growing up where you could see that going on with your father and mother?

Harvan: Well, mostly in buying things. She couldn't go out and buy anything. She used to like Hershey Kisses, and she had to sneak out to buy them and hide them at home so he wouldn't find them. Then at night she would have a couple of Hershey Kisses, just a couple pieces of chocolate. He never beat her or anything like that, but when it came to spending money, and buying things, well, it was all up to him. He made all the decisions, whether it was to renovate the house, or whatever, I mean, she had no say in anything, really. When you have to go out and buy Hershey Kisses in order to enjoy them, and hide them, it was kind of an extreme thing. But I don't think it was unusual around here. My mother had a good friend right down the street, a Mrs. Pekarik. They also had a big family. In fact, Julius -- well, we used to call him "Dula" -- was my age. We went to school and graduated together. She would come to our home, and they would talk on the porch, and her husband was -- I think he was even worse than my father, as far as being domineering. In fact, I think her main pleasure was coming up and talking to my mother, really, you know. Financially they were a little better off because he was a pretty good bootlegger. He'd make whiskey right in his back yard and would sell it. When the mines weren't working, he'd sell the moonshine. They also had a little store in the front room -- a little room about this size -- they would have canned goods and things like that for people to buy -- and he would sell the whiskey out of that store also, too. They were a little better off. But she was in the same boat. The Pekariks also came from the same town -- from Kudloce in Czechoslovakia. So, that was about the extent of my mother's life. Like I said, she was very devastated by the death of Claire. In fact, we all were. It was really hard -- you can't sleep at night and feel things would never be the same.

Dublin: How much older than Claire were you?

Harvan: There was a gap of about four years there. As I said, she was a very beautiful person. Rose was also very shaken by her death. Rose was so happy when Claire got married. I remember the day she got married -- in Chester, south of Philadelphia. After the ceremony, she said, "Oh, I'm so happy for Claire -- she found somebody, a professional person, a nice person." She was so happy for her.

Dublin: How long was it between Claire's marriage and the accident?

Harvan: Just about two years. Little over two years, it wasn't very long. I was working at the Bethlehem Steel at the time, it was in the afternoon, and over the intercom someone kept calling my name to pick up the phone. Well, I was in the darkroom at the time, and couldn't get out right away. Finally, I heard a person getting kind of angry, "Pick up the phone! Pick up the phone!" So I finally got to the phone. It was my wife and she said that Claire was in an accident, and I'd better come home. They didn't tell me at the time that she was dead, they said that she was in a real bad accident. By the time I got home, everybody was crying, so I knew at that time that she was dead. It was one of those things that happens while growing up that you never forget. Especially when it happens to a member of your family. You see a lot of deaths, but when it is part of your family who was a nice person, it's hard to take.

Dublin: And both of your parents were still alive at that time?

Harvan: Yeah. My father never showed much emotion. I never saw my father cry, really, or anything like that. He was tough. In his seventies he developed prostate cancer and when he was eighty-four he had an operation, and I never ever heard him complain about anything. I knew he was in pain, because he would sit there, almost where you are there, and I would see the expression on hs face. When he retired at sixty-five, he would just wheeze when he breathed, you could hardly stand it. In fact, it would be so annoying after a while, you would have to leave the room. I would say, "Okay, Pop, I'll see you tomorrow." He would just wheeze and wheeze. He came up with the cancer later on. As I said, I never heard him complain, though. He used to have a bottle here so he wouldn't have to walk up and down the stairs when he had to urinate. As I said, he never showed much emotion. I don't know if he was just tough that way, or if it was his make-up, but he never seemed to grieve. When my mother died, he just went along with things, through the motions of going to the funeral, etc., and life went on for him. I never saw him do anything to be physically mean to her, or anything like that. He wasn't a big man, in fact, he was kind of little. My mother really didn't have much of a life, except the family, and cooking, baking, doing the dishes, and going to church -- later on, in her life, going to church. She decided to go, regardless of what my father said. And that was her life, really. She just lived for when the children would come home for a visit. And for Margaret, who was living next door, they were very close. Margaret's first child was born next door. He only lived eighteen months when he died. His name was Frank, he was named after his father. And that also was kind of hard to take for my mother.

Dublin: That would have been the first grandchild.

Harvan: Yes the first grandchild. I imagine most families go through all these steps in their lives, heartaches, and good times. Dublin: Did your mother have a lot of good women friends? Harvan: Not many, no. Mrs. Pekarik, you know, and Mrs. Zonka. Mostly neighbors. They never had a car, never drove, never really went anywhere. In the early years, my father was a hunter, he would get out with his friends to hunt rabbits, pheasants and deer. Of course, when the mines were working, his first stop after work would be at the bar, up in Kanyuk's, next to the Am Vets Building, which was a pretty good watering place for miners, they would stop and have their shot and beer. So he would get out more than my mother. He was also the treasurer for a Slovak insurance society -- members would meet here maybe once a month. So he had friends, but my mother never did have many -- kind of led an isolated life.

Dublin: Do you think that was a little bit general for men and women of your parents' generation? That difference?

Harvan: I think so, yeah. Especially . . . . I don't know if it would apply to the Welsh or the English or the Irish, because they came over before the Slavs. But when you can't read or write English, you can't get too involved socially. Later they did get a radio. Rose bought them one, a Philco. In fact, that's the radio there -- the one Rose bought them. See it back there -- that old Philco stand-up radio? That was their main form of entertainment later on. They would sit around here in the evening and listen to Amos'n'Andy, Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, and Gabriel Heater, and the news.

Dublin: I'm curious, just because you're mentioning it, do you recall -- you would have been at the age when you might have been home -- do you remember, for instance, listening to any of Roosevelt's Fireside Chats?

Harvan: Yes. In fact, I especially remember his speech on December the eighth, when war was declared. We listened to many of his Fireside talks -- yes, we did. My father was -- interested in world events. I think we got all our curiosity traits, Rose and I, from my father, more or less. He would read a lot, even in his eighties, he would sit and read as long as he could. He would especially like to read magazines.

Dublin: So he followed politics.

Harvan: Yes, definitely. Like I mentioned before, he was a strong union person, too. He never talked much about John L. Lewis or the mines or the union -- maybe he didn't want to discuss it at home. But I'm pretty sure, at the bar, he discussed it.

Dublin: And you figure he was a strong Roosevelt voter?

Harvan: Oh, yeah.

Dublin: Would have voted for Casey Gildea when he ran [for Congress in the 1930s]?

Harvan: Yes. We all followed that trend, we're all Democrats. I know Rose was, and I am a registered Democrat. We kind of followed in that line. We more or less had to, because the Welsh and the English in Lansford -- more or less controlled everything. I mean, you were second-class citizens then. There's no way of getting around it. They looked down on you. I guess it was probably that way in the other parts of the coal region, too, where people were entrenched in a certain town, and didn't particularly take to the people who couldn't read or speak English. I went through high school, and I could still remember -- there was pupils there who never spoke to me, all through high school. But then I wasn't an outgoing type, either, where I would go looking for people to talk to. And it was a time of the Depression, you know, there are other things on your mind. You were more worried about food and things like that as your parents were. There was two classes in Lansford. There was an upper class and a lower class. It's changed a lot now. Before, if you were a Slovak or Polish, you could never belong to the fire company. You had to be Welsh or English. They started it, and they just kept their people in charge. They were the bosses.

Dublin: Now, did they hold the various offices in the town government?

Harvan: Oh, yes. In fact, there was no elections, really. It was always Republican, and they always elected the burgess. They controlled the council and police. For certain reasons, I guess, it was just like a survival thing for them, too. And they were -- more or less -- pawns of the coal company, because the coal company ran the town, really, through these people, the Welsh and English. They were just trying to hang on to what they thought they deserved and was theirs.

Dublin: Was there a time that you can remember when a transition occurred, and all of a sudden you found Slovaks holding office?

Harvan: I really don't know . . . When I graduated from high school, I went directly to the CC camps, and stayed there for two years. Six months after I got out of the CCs I found out that there was some jobs open at an air depot outside of Harrisburg in Middletown. I was there for six months when the war broke out. I was gone for five and a half years in the Pacific, and then I came back to Lansford in 1947. I imagine the war changed a lot of things. I think the war did it -- I think they realized, that all classes could get killed just as well as our kind. I think the war changed everything. I think the war finally kind of put us all, more or less, on an even basis. And then when I started taking pictures for the coal company, on a freelance basis, I associated with all the bosses at the collieries and up in Edgemont, and I didn't have any problems. But in the beginning you were looked down on, held down a bit.

Dublin: But by the time you're talking about that experience, it's probably about 1950.

Harvan: I would say late forties and early fifties.

Dublin: So in that decade between '38 when you graduated from high school, and '48 or so, there is this transition.

Harvan: Yeah. When I was going to high school, I was not a very good student. I was interested in sports, in my junior year I went out for football, got on the football team, and then I played football junior and senior year. And I George Harvan quote. was on the track team. I wasn't very good, but it was something to do. You didn't go to movies, or anything else, so you went out for sports. But my marks were terrible! I just barely got through, -- I can't ever remember taking a book home to study. My parents wanted me to go to school, but they never knew enough to say, "Well, do this, because this is the way you should do it." So I never really studied. And when the girls went away, I figured eventually I would get out of high school and go away, also, and do something . . . . When I talked about going to the CCs, they knew that I was going to leave. And since the girls left earlier, they accepted it. They felt, "You've got your life to live." I imagine my mother would have been happy for some of us to have stayed at home like Margaret did. She would have liked it, but there was nothing here. Well, you're familiar with the condition of the coal regions at that time, during the Depression, there was nothing here, really. [deletion] In our graduating class -- we had 125 pupils -- and I think there was only one boy who went to college. Out of the 65-70 boys -- only one boy, he was Joe Skellshock who became a dentist, down in the Philadelphia area. But that was it. We didn't have much choice. When I was in the CC camps, after I became a leader, and I became very good friends with my foreman, Charley Crane. He always drove the truck out to a job site, and had a crew in the back, I would ride in the front with him. During the lunch break, he would start sharing philosophical thoughts about what's going to happen to this world, and this was '39, '40. He'd say, "George, there's going to be a big war. You're going to be caught up in the middle of it. You're going to be at the right age." For me, it was going in one ear and out the other. War was the farthest thing on my mind.

Dublin: This guy was ten years older than you, or something like that?

Harvan: Oh, at least, maybe more. He could have been in his late 40s, early 50s. To run the camps, they used to have a military person, reserve officer who treated us like military people, too. We went out and did our jobs during the day, but when we came back to camp and had our supper, he made us go out -- up to the woods and cut a stick into the shape of a gun, and he would start drilling us out in the streets! The company streets, there. And we also had to take up some type of sports -- boxing, running, or whatever. This really conditioned us, at this time, we were pretty trim and in good shape. If someone threw something at you after a while, you felt, "Well, this is the way it should be," and we accepted it. [deletion]

Dublin: Now your high school graduating class, would you say that eventually a good share of them left, or that really, they found ways to make it around here?

Harvan: No, I would say eighty percent of them left. But a lot of that had to do with the war, too. A lot of people got involved with other sections of the country, like Ed Ogozalek. But anyway, he settled in Alabama, because he was at an army base in Huntsville, Alabama and liked it there. When we would have class reunions, he would always come up from Alabama. People settled in New York City, Washington D.C., California. . . . I never thought I'd ever come back to Lansford. You know, when you get out in the Pacific and it's so big, and you've seen places like Hawaii, the Philippines, and Japan -- and then you come back to a little house in a little town like this. It's almost like a miniature village. Everything is confined, everything comes down on top of you. I remember walking in this door when I first came home, after I got out of the service, and I couldn't believe that I lived in this house. It was so small. But you get used to it after a while. It comes back to you.

Dublin: Why don't you tell me about how you got into the service, and what your war years were like.

Harvan: I'll tell you a little bit about [my brother] Ted, first, and that'll clear up the family, more or less. Ted was about four or five years younger than Claire. And Ted was pretty good with radios and electronics. He liked electronics. He could make radios, and listen to short wave broadcasts. When he got out of high school, he decided to go to school with RCA. He got a job with RCA and worked with them for many years. . . . After my mother died he came back to Lansford, he met a few fellows, and they decided to go into an electronics business here. The venture flopped; he lost all his savings. Kind of devastated him. . . . After that, he started to work for the television cable company here, in Lansford. Cable was just starting. He installed sets for subscribers. He then went into business for himself -- repairing television sets. He did that for a number of years[, but finally] started to work for an appliance store in Lehighton, the Koch Brothers, who sold television sets and other appliances. He repaired T.V. sets, washers, dryers, etc. He worked there for about six or seven months, and it was on Thanksgiving Day, we had dinner at our house next door. I noticed he was talking a little strange. I asked him, "Ted. What's wrong? You're slurring your speech." He said, " I had a wisdom tooth pulled and maybe it's not healing properly or something like that." "Farina" Kalny, who was his best friend, mentioned that it seemed like his speech was getting worse. "Farina" said, "Let's go down to the doctor." Farina took him down to the doctor in Jim Thorpe. I was working down at the steel, so he took him to the doctor -- Dr. McGimley -- he examined him, diagnosed him immediately as having Lou Gehrig's disease. . . . We had a couch right here in the parlor, and he used to just lay here and watch television. And . . . he would get very frustrated. Lou Gehrig's disease attacks all your muscles and nerves, but your mind stays intact. The doctor once told me, "If there was ever a disease that was devised by the devil, it is Lou Gehrig's disease." [deletion] It was kind of a sad thing, the way a body could deteriorate with this disease, a tube in his stomach and being fed that way. But he was getting worse. . . . He got to the point where he would try to write, but he couldn't grasp a pencil properly, and all of a sudden he would get frustrated and everything would go off the table -- the pencils and paper and everything else that was on it. And then I would pick it up. [deletion] The only one that died before my mother was Claire. And then the rest passed away. My father died in '74. Ted was alive then. In fact, Ted had just seen him at the Gnadden Huetten hospital. He was sitting in a chair, and it was in February when Ted last saw him. It had snowed the night before, because I had stopped in from Bethlehem on the way home, and I remember him telling me, "You'd better get on home. It's snowing out there." The roads were bad, and all that. So I stayed a while and went home. Ted visited the next day, and talked a while. My father said he was tired, and felt a little sleepy. So Ted headed home, and by the time he got there, we got a phone call informing us that my father had died. Ted never had a phone, so they called us at our home. He died sitting in the chair. He was 89. As I said before, he never complained.

Dublin: And considering that he had black lung, it's remarkable to live that long.

Harvan: It's a funny thing, though, about the black lung, Tom. Through the years, he used to like to walk a lot, from the time he was 65 to the time he was in his eighties, his lungs seemed to get better. I mean, he didn't wheeze as much, not near as much. In the beginning, when he would spit out in the basement sink, all this black stuff would come up, it would be horrible. He would gag almost like Ted was gagging when he had Lou Gehrig's disease -- not quite as bad as that, but he would cough -- to get all the coal dust up. He did like to walk, however, and would get out every morning, and walk up through the woods, up in the back hills, up around the Acme store, up in the mountains, and come back and have a meal. He had a routine. He was in bed every night at nine o'clock. [deletion]

Dublin: So you were about to tell me about going into the Army, your service in World War II, and how you became a photographer.

Harvan: I mentioned I was working in Middletown for six months after I got out of the CC camps. I knew nothing about airplanes. I don't know why they hired me, but I had an interview, and I put down my CC experiences, and how I worked myself up. I think that had something to do with it. I filled out all the forms and got the job. There were about four or five fellows from Lansford working at the depot. The two Melnick boys up the street here, Mike and Johnny, "Petie" McHugh -- he was a little older -- "Bunker" Boyle, Joe Philipovich, and "Speed" Piaia, they all worked there -- and also Joe Sniscak. Through them I found out about the job. We all stayed in the same house -- same rooming place -- taking turns sleeping, some were on night shift, some worked days. I got the job about May of '41, and they put me in the engine department where all I was doing was tearing down aircraft engines and cleaning the parts and putting them on racks, and I would then have to polish certain parts. And after a while, I started to do other jobs around the hangar. The air depot was -- as I look back now -- something the government had been planning. They anticipated perhaps there was going to be a major confrontation in the future. So they started to utilize these air depots -- civilian air depots all up the United States, to repair aircraft, rebuild engines, replace skin on the fuselage, change electrical components, or whatever else had to be done. They had a number of them in the east -- one in Middletown, one up at Westover Field up near Boston, and they had one down in Florida -- Homestead Field. And I know they had one out in California at San Bernardino.

Dublin: And these eventually became Air Force bases? Or Army Air Force bases?

Harvan: No, these were just air depots, they called them -- where they would bring airplanes in to have them repaired -- . . . military planes. At that time, they must have felt, "This is a good way to start training people, in case we do have a war, we will have trained people." So they started to train people, and that's how they took me. As I said, I didn't know anything about an airplane. I'd been up in small planes, but that was about it. After I worked there for about six or seven months, when it all happened, World War II broke out. It was December the seventh, 1941. I was on a night shift at the time. I was with "Dula" Picarik that Sunday night, who was working at the Mack plant at the time. His brother got the job for him at the truck plant in Allentown. He did have a car, and went out for a ride, and we talked about the bombing at Pearl Harbor. That was Sunday night, and then the war was declared by President Roosevelt on December the eighth. I remember listening to the speech right here, the declaration of war. I had to be at work Monday night, so I headed back to Middletown. A couple of the fellows who worked at the depot had cars. We'd come home practically every weekend -- because we were so crowded living in the same house. Petie and I had the same bedroom. I would use it in the daytime, and he'd use it at night. So it was cheaper that way. We weren't making that much money, really.

Dublin: So that's fifty, sixty miles away.

Harvan: Harrisburg. No, it's ninety, one hundred miles. Harrisburg's about eighty-five miles, and then Middletown's about seven, eight, ten miles south, along the Susquehanna. And we would have to go from Harrisburg to Middletown, but there was always a ride; people had cars. When war was declared on December eighth, I had gone to work Monday night. The first thing they told us was to meet in the hangar, and I still remember the steps. A Captain got up on them and started explaining about the damage that was done at Hickam Field to the planes. They didn't have too much information, he said, but they are looking for people to go to Hickam Field, on a volunteer basis, to work on the damaged planes. That's all he said. Well, there must have been about two hundred people there, on the shift, and somebody in the back said, "I'll go." I was up in front, and the Captain looked me right in the eye, and he said, "You'll go, won't you?" And I said, "Yeah, I'll go," just like that. I never much thought about it. They got about eighteen volunteers, and we went back to work. When I did get back to my job, John Correl who was my foreman, said, "George, what do you want to do that for?" I said, "John, they're not going to take me." I said, "I don't know anything. They're going to take people who know a lot more about airplanes than I do." I never heard another word and never gave it much thought. Christmas came, New Year's passed. No one heard anything. Just a dead silence about the matter. I was on a night shift again, and was in the men's locker room, I just got to work, when I heard my name being called. I was informed to report to headquarters. I went up to the office, and they told me that in two days a plane is going to take us to California. They told me to be at the depot the next day to get some shots. I said, "I can't. I have to remove all these clothes at my room and get them back to Lansford." So they said, "Just before you get on the plane you can get the shots." It was a military plane, an old DC-6. It didn't have regular seats, it just had a benches along each side. So I immediately left work and I came back to Harrisburg, got a little sleep, got up early, and took a bus to Harrisburg and then to Pottsville, and to Lansford. Got in here about two o'clock in the afternoon. My mother was surprised. She said, "What are you home for?" And I told her, and she started to cry. I said, "All I had to do was sign up for a year." I said, "After a year, they'll send me back." In those days, we knew little about the Japanese, and thought the war was going to last a few months and will be all over with. We're going to be back soon, and that would be it. My father was not home -- we waited around here a while, and finally my mother calmed down a little bit, and started to make supper. She said, "You're going to eat?" And I said, "Yeah, I'll have supper." Frank, my brother-in-law, was living next door, and he said, "I'll borrow my father's car and I'll take you back to Harrisburg." We waited for my father and it was starting to get late. When he never showed up, I went up to Kanyuk's Bar. And he was surprised to see me. So he told Steve, the owner, "Give him a beer." Told the bartender, what I was up to so I had a free beer. After I told him what was happening, my father came home. He had a pretty good load on, but he wanted to go to Harrisburg with Frank and I. . . . they let me off. And the next morning, I go down to Middletown. They gave me the shots. And at that time -- they had eighteen volunteers -- I got the required shots. The other people got them the day before. For some reason, one of the shots they gave us, a yellow fever shot, was contaminated. Well, we go on the plane, and the engines wouldn't start. [laughs] This was January, just after the New Year. We got off the plane, went into the hangar. They worked on the problem for a while and then they started the engines. Then the engines quit again. I thought, "Oh brother, this a good start." So finally they got the engines working and we took off -- we were supposed to land at New Orleans. Spend the night there, and then go cross-country to California. We ran into a very bad storm over Tennessee, really bad. In the meantime people on board were getting sick. Everybody was throwing up, I mean, it was a mess. I was the only one that wasn't sick. I couldn't believe it. Things were really bad. Some people were worse than others. They were bent over. So the pilot decided to land in Maxwell Air Base, outside of Birmingham, Alabama. It was raining very hard at the time. We ran off the runway into a muddy field, and when we got out of the plane and we were knee-deep in mud. When we got to the base, they put all the sick into the infirmary because they had a bad case of the heaves. I was the only one not throwing up, but the next day I got it. It took a day to get the bug working as I had taken my shots a day later . . . We never knew what it was. It turned out we all had Hepatitis B. After I got to Hawaii I never did anything about it, and I had the illness practically all my time I was out in Pacific. I never really felt good after that. . . . I found out about the contaminated shots when I came out of the service, years later. I was reading one of the service journals, and they mentioned how they were looking for people who had gotten these shots early in the war -- and you're talking something like fifteen years later, would they contact the veterans [administration]. So I went up to Wilkes-Barre, and they started checking me out. The effects were still there, but eventually I got rid of the symptoms. [deletion] That's how I got to Birmingham, Alabama. After a few days, when people picked up a little, we took off, and landed at Moffett Air Base just outside of San Francisco. It was an air base run by the Air Force. We were there about two or three weeks, lived in tents, rained practically every day. One day they informed us that we were going to board a ship in San Francisco the next morning. It was four o'clock when they got us awake, we left everything there, mattresses, and bunks and everything in the pouring rain and mud -- and took what clothes we had on us -- a bag -- and that was it. It was still dark when we got to San Francisco, it was still pouring. The ship was called the U.S.S. Grant. It had just come down from Alaska with dependents who lived in Alaska, they brought them out of Alaska, back to the States. They must have had a rough journey, because the place was full of vomit. The crew had no time to clean up the mess, it smelled to high heaven. I went down into the hold and couldn't stand it. You had to just get out of the quarters and get out on deck. I can still remember, when dawn broke, going underneath the Golden Gate Bridge. That's how we set sail for Hawaii, and Hickam Field.

Dublin: And you were going to be something like an airplane mechanic, although you weren't that skilled yet.

Harvan: I didn't know what I was going to do, really. I was just doing the basic things -- well, what can you learn in seven months? Not much. It took us seven days to get from San Francisco to Hawaii. I would always stay up on deck, it was kind of cold and chilly, I still had my CC jacket. It was a three-quarter length -- a little bigger than a suit coat -- but it was pretty heavy and it kept me warm. I remember wearing that thing practically all the way. They gave us life jackets the first thing. I would always stay up on deck. I would sleep on deck. It was an old ship. The U.S.S. Grant was confiscated by the United States from the Germans after World War I. It actually was the yacht of the Kaiser but was a fairly big ship -- it still had the brass railings and other ornaments. This was 1941 and the World War was over in 1918. You can imagine how old this ship was, and boy did it creak. I'm telling you, it was like a haunted castle down below. As I said it still had some of the brass railings and the carpeting in the officers' dining. We ate with the officers. We had troops on ship, also, GIs. In fact, it was the first convoy to leave San Francisco after the war, for the Pacific.

Dublin: So about how many people were in this convoy? On the ship, and were there other ships with it?

Harvan: Oh yes, we had two destroyers, a cruiser, a freighter, and our ship -- the troop ship. As I said, we had GIs, enlisted men. They had their own quarters. We more or less stayed with the officers. We ate with them. The enlisted men had their own mess hall. Well anyway, it took us seven days to get to Hawaii. I can recall watching the sun, it seemed sometimes you would be going west, other times the sun would be off to the left. You knew that we were zig-zagging. It was about six days later -- it was a Friday then. We had set out on Thursday. That Friday, at night, the Navy personnel chased us off on deck, and told us, "You have to go below." You didn't ask questions, you went below. We go down below in the hold of the ship and some time later the engines quit running. Everything was very quiet. Then the depth charges started to go off. Evidently, the Japanese had been following us all the way, in submarines. They decided since we were going to land shortly -- we did land on a Sunday. The Japanese figured if they're going to do damage to our ships, they should do it now. The cruiser and the destroyer tried to get the submarines, so they dropped the depth charges. It was very quiet below, and we were told, "No one could make a noise," and you could hear whimpering, and crying -- the tension getting to them, because it lasted some time. You were almost expecting a missile to go through the side, a torpedo or shell. Finally, after a while, the engines started up again and we were on our way. I was quite relieved to be moving again. But they never would allow us up on deck again to sleep. First thing in the morning, I went up on deck, and asked one of the crewmen, "What was going on last night?" He replied, "The Japanese -- we were trying to get the submarines that were after the freighter." They never did get it. What was on the freighter? We didn't know it at the time but the ship was carrying B-26 Bombers packed in crates. That's why they were sending us to Hickam Field, to put these bombers together. We didn't land in Pearl Harbor but at a small naval station, Kanehoe, between Honolulu and Pearl Harbor. After departing the ship they put us on a train. I can remember going by Hickam Field and Pearl Harbor, and then I saw the devastation. Up until that time, I never realized how much damage the Japanese did on the 7th. Then it hit me! Even more than the encounter with the Japanese subs but that changed when I saw the damage. Well that's how I got to Hawaii, to Hickam Field, as a civilian, supposedly for one year, to work on air planes. We worked practically day and night assembling the B-26's, on different shifts, putting them together and checking them out. The B-26 was called the Martin Marauder -- it was a very hot ship, had a Davis wing. It wasn't really fully tested at the time, but we didn't have much of an Air Force in those days -- the early days of the war. We were at rock bottom. The plane was built down at the Martin plant in Baltimore. And evidently it took all that time to crate them, the engines, the wings, the fuselage, and everything else. And that was our job, to put the parts together and make a flyable airplane. . . . the main thing I did . . . after we got through with the B-26s, was repairing and rebuilding engines.

Dublin: How long did you stay?

Harvan: Well, I was too young for the draft. I was twenty. The draft was for age twenty-one. I got to Hawaii in January. I wasn't twenty-one until February 25th. So when the time came, I signed for the draft, in Hawaii. They sent me up to Schofield Barracks. I was there a few days. And since the work I was doing at the time was important -- putting these planes together -- they sent me back to Hickam. But they put me in the Reserves. We could have very easily done the work as GIs, but I guess we were working as a team, certain people had certain jobs to do. Then the next year, when my year was up, they came and asked if I would stay for another year. And I said, "No," at first, I said, "No, I signed up for a year and I want to go home." And the other fellows felt the same way. We lived in these homes, and we were all kind of together -- close-knit. Finally six of us decided to sign up for another year. . . . So I did that. And then it was two years. And after the third year -- it was '44 -- they put me in the service as a G.I.

[While serving in the Army, George Harvan became sick with an ulcer. After a lengthy recuperation, he returned to duty, though not to work on airplanes. While awaiting his discharge, an opportunity emerged that would give him his life's work. He described the incident]

I didn't have much to do, not much of anything, really. Just trying to recuperate, more or less. I worked for a Captain there, one day he came to me, the war had just ended. "George," he said, "I know you like photography." I said, "I like taking pictures." I used to, on my days off, go to Honolulu and use the camera. The war, as I said, was over now. A few months later he came and told me that he was going to Japan. "Special services," he said. "You want to go?" I said, "No. I have a few months to go. I'm going home." So then he replied, "If you change your mind, let me know. I could rig up a deal for you to get a leave back home. You'd have to join the regular Army, however, for eighteen months. But it would be a chance for you to see Japan, with the Army of Occupation." I wasn't in the mood at the time. I thought about it after a while, and then one day accepted the offer. "Put the papers through. Will the thirty days be from Hawaii?" He said, "No, I'll set it up from Ft. Meade, Maryland." So all the travel time was on the government. So I got to Ft. Meade, Maryland, got my thirty days leave, spent a nice thirty days here. It was in the summertime, in June. After it was up I went back to Ft. Meade. I did this all on my own, I had to go cross-country again, to Ft. Lewis, Washington, again, and get on a boat there and go to Japan. And that's how I wound up in Japan, with the Special Services, and that's how I became a photographer.

Dublin: And that would have started in '46?

Harvan: Late '45, yeah. The sergeant who had gone to Lawry Field, through the photography school there, was in charge of the photo lab. His time was up so he left the service. I never went to any service photography schools, or had any photo training. They did change my MOS to photographer. They put me in charge of the lab. We were doing aerial work, developing aerial film, for reconnaissance and mapping. They gave me a Speed Graphic with film and flashbulbs. And I also had a Jeep. I had a patch on my sleeve that was able to get in off-limit places, and for almost eighteen months I had a pretty good experience. I was able to learn about the Speed Graphic and how to use it, at times some important people from the Air Force would be coming into Yokohama on ship, and they would send me down to get pictures of them getting off the boat, or meeting other dignataries. I never did any combat work because the war was over, but it was a good experience for me. We did do some aerial work.

Dublin: So your formal training occurred then.

Harvan: Yes, as I had a Jeep, I was able to roam around Japan quite freely. I would often go to off-limit places. This one instance I would like to relate was when I didn't use the Jeep and I took a train. Train travel was the best way to get around Japan. If the Japanese wanted to go a hundred miles, they thought nothing of it, they would travel by train to get some rice or other food stuffs. This one day, when I used the train, I got lost. I really got lost. I got a little confused to where I was. I had my camera with me, and I also had some C-rations. I just didn't know where I was, because in most off-limits areas, there was no GIs around. As it was getting dark, I got off at this one railroad station, and when I did, all the Japanese people at the station just circled me -- completely around -- I'm asking them about "Johnson Air Base." Where it was located. Well, they couldn't understand English, and I couldn't make myself known, so finally I walked off to the side, and some kids followed me, I sat down on the stoop, pulled out the C-rations, and they were staring at me. Finally I just threw the rations at them, they grabbed the rations and started eating them. I thought, "Well, I can't stay here." So I got back on the train, and I rode the trains all night -- different trains -- it would stop, and I'd get on another one. It was starting to get crowded in the early morning. I remember the Japanese getting aboard with chickens, pigs, and other animals -- going to market, I guess. Finally, late in the morning, I got off and I ran into an MP -- I wasn't too far from my base, maybe fifty or sixty miles, but I had been going in circles all night long. Finally, I did make it back to the base. Being as I was in charge of the lab, I was more or less my own boss. I had three Japanese working for me then, who used to clean up the place, mix chemicals, and stuff like that. Two of them were good. The other one was a former officer who felt he was still in the Japanese army, and every now and then, we would find things missing. So, I mentioned this to the MPs, and they caught him one day, stealing things, and they beat the daylights out of him. That was the end of him. But, I had another fellow -- a fellow by the name of Watanabe -- we became pretty good friends. I wasn't too happy with the Japanese for the things they had done to the Americans, especially the prisoners, in the early part of the war. It took me a while to really get used to them. This guy -- he would speak in broken English to you about his family and the trouble he was having getting food to them. I even got to the point where I would get things out of the mess hall, canned things, and I would slip them to him, so he could take them home. He would tell me about going two hundred miles up to the northern part of Japan on a weekend, to get rice. I guess we're all human beings after a while. You get compassion for some people when they tell you these stories . .. And they were just people in this country. You were told to do certain things and they did them. There was just this minority up on top who decided to make war. The ordinary people had to suffer for it. As I said, I used to slip him some food, every now and then. When I was ready to go back to the states, I was there for almost a year and a half. I also became pretty good friends with other Japanese. There were some who had converted to Christianity, and had their own services. Every now and then, I would drop in. All during the time I was in the Pacific, I never went to church, never went to Mass. I went by hundreds of services being said in the field, and I never bothered to stop. I would go right by. But, when I got to Japan, I started to see things a little differently. I would, now and then, participate. It wasn't a Catholic mass but a Christian service. I would just stop in, and I would just sit there. When I was ready to go back home, Watanabe came to the lab one day with a nice looking case, a jewelry case, and he wanted me to have it. I asked him what was in it, he said a string of pearls. When I opened it, it was a hand-cultured set of pearls that had been in his family for hundreds of years, and he wanted to give them to me, and I didn't want to take them. Finally, he insisted, and I accepted. We didn't have any lockers in the barracks at this base. The place was called Iramagaua. It was here where the Japanese trained the Kamikaze pilots, so it was kind of a spartan camp. We had just a plain, wooden building which had a false ceiling, every night the rats would run up and down the ceiling. You could see spots where they made their droppings. They seemed to have a race from one end to another. So it was a very simple camp, with no lockers. We did have barracks bags; that's where we kept all our clothes and all other possessions. If you had a camera, as I did, you carried it with you, because it would be surely stolen. I couldn't carry the pearls with me, I thought, if I wrapped them in a lot of clothes and put them in the bottom of my bag, no one would find them. Some GIs used to go around and feel around the barracks bags for solid objects, they were into the black market and anything they could acquire they would peddle. One day I checked on these pearls, and sure enough they were gone, someone stole them. I never told Watanabe what happened. I guess he always felt I still had them. I didn't have the heart to tell him the truth. When I would have some free time, I started to take pictures with a Rolleicord -- a twin-lens reflex -- a German camera. Being that the Germans and the Japanese were allies during the war, they were trading partners. So we were still able to pick up some good German cameras -- like the early Leicas and the Rolleiflexes -- in Tokyo. I didn't smoke at the time, but every week I got a carton of cigarettes. You couldn't keep them in the barracks because they would be stolen. However, I knew the head cook, and I'd make prints for him. When I got the cartons of cigarettes every week as a ration, I asked him to keep them for me. He kept them in the mess hall, locked up. After I got about twenty cartons of cigarettes accumulated, and it was three or four months before I was scheduled to go back home -- my time was up -- I felt I should get me a Rolleiflex. Which at the time was the top of the line. I'm going to be sitting on the top of the world owning a Rolleiflex. So I packed up the twenty carton of cigarettes in the barracks bag, got on the train, and I didn't want to go all the way into Tokyo itself, too many MP's. So I got off in a suburb of Tokyo called Wayno. While walking down the street, I saw a Rolleiflex in the window, I quickly darted into the shop and showed the cigarettes to the owner, and he agreed to give me the camera, took the camera out of the window and gave it to me. It was a standard Rolleiflex. The standard had little levers on the side while the automatic had little wheels that designated your F stops and shutter speeds. When I walked down the street a little further I saw an automatic in a window, so I ran back to the first store, got my cigarettes and gave him the camera -- he was quite upset. That's how I got the automatic Rolleiflex, my first good camera. Well, I guarded that camera with my life. And, as I had more free time then, I used to walk the streets of Tokyo. I started to photograph the people on the streets. I couldn't get any standard film for the Rolleiflex, but what I would do so I could use the camera was use aerial film. I had some old paper backings -- and I would go in the darkroom and I would cut the aerial film into strips, and I would tape the film onto the backing, it was kind of flexible, aerial film was a little thicker than regular film, but I was able to utilize it. Making twelve exposures on the spool. That way I had film for the Rollei. I had film packs for the four by five Speed Graphic, but it was much easier for me to take pictures on the streets with the Rolleiflex, so that I did.

Dublin: So the Rolleiflex is anticipating 35mm, it's getting a little bit closer to that size?

Harvan: Well. . . the earlier 35mm films weren't as good as they are today. They were grainy, and you could blow them up to five by seven, or just a bit larger, but that was it. The lenses were faster. But the Rolleiflex had a real good lens, a Tessar F 3.5 AS. The film size was bigger, you didn't have to blow up your negatives as much. After the war, magazine and newspaper photographers weren't shooting 35mm, most were using Rolleiflex or 4 by 5 Speed Graphic -- people like Fritz Henle were making a name using the Rolleiflex. They were utilizing the two and quarter square image. When Rose worked for Holiday, she used three or four Rollei's, two for color and one for black and white. I still have three of her cameras, which she gave me. She liked working with these cameras, because the negatives and transparencies were bigger, you did get a bigger color image, too. So, it helped in the reproduction, and in selling your work. The Leica really didn't come into vogue until about ten years after -- during the Korean War -- when David Douglas Duncan, a Life photographer, and a number of other photographers started to use the 35mm. There were some who used the 35mm in World War II, like Eugene Smith, but not many. Most of the good work was done with the four by five Speed Graphics, or Compat Graphics. Joe Rosenthal's picture at Iwo Jima of the flag raising -- that was made with a four by five Speed Graphic. Well that's how I got into photography -- it just seemed to grow on you, as if you had to take pictures. It never seemed like I was happy or contented unless I was taking pictures, or out with the camera. I spent all my spare time in Tokyo taking pictures of the people on the street. That's how I accumulated a sizable group of pictures of the people at that time.

Dublin: So were you able to bring back the negatives as well as the prints?

Harvan: Yeah. We had trouble with the mail, things getting lost, but I did manage to get my negatives home. I would like to relate another incident when I was taking pictures as the base photographer. I got a note from our Commander that a General in the 5th Air Force, his name, I believe was Burns, had requested that a photographer be sent to Tokyo on a certain day, that the Emperor of Japan was having a birthday party for his son, Prince Okihito, who was eight years old at the time. The emperor was inviting members of the military government to this party in the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. The palace has a moat around it, to isolate it. People who worked in the Imperial Palace weren't allowed to leave. They had to work and live there on the premises. Very few people from the outside world had a chance to really get into the Imperial Palace, and here I was, going to see the inside of the Imperial Palace. Well, I got in there, went across the moat, went into this huge room where all the guests were, the Emperor was present, and also his son. I had to take pictures, posed shots with them and the General. After the session for pictures taking was over, they retired to the dining room, to which I wasn't invited to and I had to leave. But I did my photographs, I was there for maybe an hour or so, forty-five minutes or an hour, but I did get into the Imperial Palace.

Dublin: So you went back and you developed those?

Harvan: Yeah, I went back to the base, made prints, enlarged them to eight by ten and delivered them. They were real happy with the results. Actually they were nothing, really -- you know, just group shots, people standing around, talking and drinking. A lot of military people. I thought General MacArthur was going to be there also, but he wasn't around at the time. He was at the dinner however, at the seating, but I never saw him. I did, however, see General MacArthur many times, coming out of the Dai'Ichi Building, which was the headquarters for the Army of Occupation. I would wait outside the building with my camera, so did make some negatives of him, these negatives got away from me.

Dublin: About how many photos or prints or negatives did you eventually bring back with you?

Harvan: Oh, I have about three, four hundred negatives. I never really counted them. From those, I would say I have about fifty or sixty that I really thought are worthwhile. About six months before I was ready to come home, I got word that there was a bad Japanese train wreck, about twenty miles away. I went to headquarters and asked permission to photograph the wreck. After I got this, I got in the jeep, taking my 4 by 5 Speed Graphic. When I arrived at the scene I found bodies all over the place. Evidently, a train -- like most Japanese trains, at that time, the cars were made of wood, the only thing made of metal on them was the undercarriage and the wheels, but the rest was all wood. The train had been coming down the side of a mountain, and when it got near the bottom, there was a sharp turn which it failed to negotiate. It went off the tracks, and the cars, which were crowded, went down an embankment. Most of the Japanese trains were almost always full. The undercarriage come down on top of the passengers and just squashed a lot of them. By the time I got there, they were starting to lay the dead in the open field, some were still being pulled out of the wreckage and laid in rows to be identified. I started taking pictures of the tragedy. Even then, I started to look for the human interest angle. I just didn't want to show bodies -- I looked for people showing -- in what I wanted to record. Most Japanese had these little buggies with the one wheel in the front and two in the back, and they would lay the corpse in a buggy and pull it away. When I got back, I developed the film, and the negatives came out all right. As far as I knew there were 156 dead, that was a lot of corpses. I didn't know what to do with the photos when I printed them. While in Tokyo, I went into the AP office, just for curiosity. A man by the name of Russell Brines, who was head of the AP Bureau there, I showed him the negatives, along with a few prints -- it was just the next day. He liked the pictures a lot and wanted to use them. I gave my permission. I never saw any in print, but he did send them out. I never got anything for them, because the negatives weren't actually mine as I was still in the service. The military had no use for them. The pictures were strictly civilian, so they didn't care. Anyway I got to know Russell quite well. Every now and then, I would stop in the office. One day, he asked me if I would like to stay here and join the AP. I refused the offer and told him I was going home soon. I had been here a long time, since January of '42 -- and this was about April of '47. I had decided that I was either going to either go to journalism school or to photography school. I had sent some pictures to the Art Center School in Los Angeles in the meantime. They wanted to see about six pictures -- work I had done in the past. I corresponded with them, told them I would be discharged in June. They told me to stop in the Center on the way home in June. I was discharged at Ft. Hamilton -- and I went down to Los Angeles, and I saw the school, and I thought, "This is going to be neat, and get a good education. I'll finally get some instruction." They informed me that they could take me in after Labor Day -- I thought I'll go on home for a couple months, and I could start school in September. Well, anyway, Russell was kind of disappointed that I didn't take the job. I often wonder -- as you look back, what would have happened had I stayed. I mentioned this once to Rose, and asked her what would have happened if we had stayed in Europe -- and I said what would have happened if I had stayed in Japan? You make certain decisions, later on, you look back, and you ask yourself, "Why did I do that? What prompted me to do that?" I guess, sometimes you don't even think, I guess. You do a certain thing, you make up your mind, and you do it. That's all. Probably, if I hadn't contacted the Art Center School, was thinking about going there, I probably would have taken the job with A.P. I think I would have. I probably would have wound up in Korea, because the Korean War started a few years after that. That's when the Japanese started to manufacture lenses and camera again. It took them ten years, but they did make some real good lenses. At this time, Duncan put some Japanese lens -- Nikkor lens -- on the Leica body -- he was working for Life Magazine at the time -- when he sent the negatives back to New York and the people at the lab couldn't imagine why the images were so clear -- and so sharp. They wanted to know what lenses he was using. The Japanese had decided to try the lenses out with some of the American photographers. And they gave these lenses out to compare them with German lenses. They're worth thousands of dollars now, these were the early ones. The early Nikons, was the range finder camera. An early Nikon now will run you about ten or twelve thousand dollars, just the body. They made very few of them. It was a well-designed camera, a little bigger than the Leica camera, a little boxier -- not a round, but very efficient. It was built more on the German Contact design than the Leica. That's how the Japanese broke into the camera market, which they practically dominate now, all the good cameras are made there. The Leica cameras are still very good, and are made in Germany -- but most of the good cameras now are made in Japan.

14m47s

Thomas Dublin

George Harvan

Dublin: So, George, you were going to tell me a bit about the way in which your photography in Japan got you started and set certain patterns for you in your later work. Why don't...

Harvan: Okay, on my days off, with an old Rolleicord, I started to photograph the people on the streets of Tokyo, the homeless, the old, a Japanese war veteran with a leg cut off, walking with the aid of a crutch. I think it was at this time that my documentary-style type of photography evolved. What drew me to take these type of pictures and disregard other types of photographs is hard to explain, but for some reason, I concentrated all my efforts on the human side of people as they moved along the streets of Tokyo. I think that was the beginning of my serious photographic endeavors. I actually felt then that this was what I want to do with my life, to be a photographer. Later on, when I was offered other jobs, I turned them down and stayed in the photographic field. I think this was when it all began.

Dublin: Had you done a little bit of photography growing up here in Lansford?

Harvan: Very little, because, like I said before, we didn't have much money. We didn't have money for film. Rose gave me an old Kodak that I used occasionally. I first developed some film up in the attic in small trays. But I never did anything seriously. The only pictures I took that had some meaning were at a boxing club up at Holmes Gym about a block away. I took photos of some of the boxers. I think I have just one picture of that whole group -- one of "Jouch" McLaughlin -- and that's about the only one I have left of that whole series. When I went to the CCs, it's hard to believe that I never took any photos. I never owned a camera while I was at the camps. It was a matter of not being able to afford photography. Just like prior years back here, most people never got into taking pictures because it was out of their means, buying a camera and film, and getting it processed. I never did anything photographically in the CCs, which I deeply regret. In Hawaii I didn't use the camera very much there either. Early in the war we had blackouts most of the time, and the place was under martial law. Walking around with a camera under those conditions wasn't a very smart thing to do. I did pick up a little camera, a C-3 Argus, did a few things around the beach, but nothing serious.

Dublin: So your first real serious photography came when you went to Japan?

Harvan: Yes, after I became a photographer and became part of the photo lab there. Later on I was made head of the lab. We made a lot of aerial pictures and processed the film -- reconnaissance and mapping. I remember seeing, very vividly, all the pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in detail, how it affected me. Well, I'll want to get back to that -- about the pictures that I made of rocks when we had the atomic bomb scare in the '60s, the Cold War, and how all these pictures of cities that were leveled -- how they affected my feelings about life maybe fifteen, twenty years later, how it must have felt if a hundred atomic bombs were dropped on us. Civilization, what would happen to it. I'll get back to that later on.

Dublin: So in your last months, you took a fair number of photographs on the streets.

Harvan: Yes, when I got back to the States -- I don't know if I mentioned this -- Life had a contest for young photographers, and I sent the pictures of my street photographs of Tokyo, I was one of the six finalists. I didn't take the top prize, but Dennis Stock did -- the deal was you would get a job with Life as a photographer if you were selected. I didn't quite make it.

Dublin: Did they publish a couple of your photos?

Harvan: No, but I have letters stating that I was one of the finalists. It was quite an honor, too, because I imagine they got quite a few contestants. And they were -- I think I sent in about twelve or fifteen photographs of people -- children, an outstanding picture of [an] old woman pushing a cart. Another photo shows a woman with a child on her back looking down into the water of a heavily damaged building. There were interesting pictures, a lot of emotion in them.

Dublin: So Tokyo had a real bombed-out look?

Harvan: Yes, it was kind of devastated. A lot of the buildings were just flattened and destroyed by fire The area around the railroad station was completely gutted, and that was right in downtown Tokyo.

Dublin: You would have been taking these photos in 1946?

Harvan: Yeah, '46, and the first part of '47. There was very little building going on, mostly cleaning up the damage. I have many shots of people clearing away stones and bricks -- trying to clean up the place. There were very few vehicles on the streets, maybe some coal-fired trucks. Most everything was moved with buggies, two-wheel buggies and hand-pushed. But that was when I started to get a real feel for photography, I would say. I had mentioned trying to get into the Art Center, in Los Angeles, and the reason I pursued that was because one of the fellows at the lab was from New York City, he was there prior to me, and was a good photographer. He got me interested in the Art Center, and photography as an art form. I learned how to operate the Speed Graphic from him, because I never participated in any photography school. Where he would decide to do some work, he would take just two or three holders, and take four or six shots. He often said, "That's enough." Imagine going out all day and taking just four shots. Some days he'd come back and take only two. He was a very critical and deliberate photographer.

Dublin: The Speed Graphic was a four by five format?

Harvan: Four by five Speed Graphic was a standard camera that was issued to all the combat photographers, or Army photographers. And it was the standard for the news photographers in the United States, in the '40s. If you're familiar with the photographs of Weegee, the New York street photographer, who photographed a lot of robberies and murders and life on the streets of that city. He worked with a Speed Graphic and a single flash gun. It was the standard, four by five. You had to load holders, no roll film back then, you had to pull the slide, cock the shutter, and put the flash bulb in, focus and shoot. It required a lot of thinking. It's a lot easier with modern cameras.

Dublin: So you could see why a person would say that he would take four pictures in a day, not four rolls of pictures in a day.

Harvan: Yes, well, the reason why he did that, also was he tried to train himself just to take exactly what he wanted making sure the light was right, the composition pleasing, and everything else that made up a good photograph. Even nowadays, when you go out and set up a big view camera, an eight by ten, you want to make sure everything comes together, because you can't make a lot of exposures. You might take two or three, and that's it. It's a different type of photography. Then, when the small cameras became popular, naturally, with Life magazine leading the way, photographers exposed a lot more film. They were more interested in getting a fleeting emotion or expression, than they were in composition or detail. If they could get that one shot that told the story, they were satisfied -- whether it took them two rolls or three rolls or more.

Dublin: And there's something that's potentially a little more spontaneous about that. It's a little less set-up.

Harvan: Right. You're not setting your camera up on a tripod or other support. Everything is in motion. And sometimes, during the shoot, there's something that really grabs you, and that's the image they were looking for.

Dublin: So, you left in what month?

Harvan: I left in June of '47. I left Johnson Air Base, and I had gone to a replacement center called Zama, and I waited for a boat to leave. . . . So I got to California, I was discharged at Hamilton Field, not far from Moffett Field, where I originally left from in 1942. When I got to California, I then went from San Francisco, to Los Angeles, saw the Art Center, kind of liked it, thought, well, in a few months I'd be out here again. And went on home, and that's how I got back to Lansford.

Dublin: So when you came back to Lansford you did have the intention of going back to Los Angeles?

Harvan: Yes, I did. They told me when I was there in June that they would accept me in September 1947. And I thought, "Well, a couple months, I could go home and meet some of the fellows that I grew up with, and have a few beers with them." Right before Labor Day I got a letter from the school and they informed me they couldn't accept me until January. I didn't feel like laying around until that time and I was a little disappointed. In the meantime, I heard about a job here at the Morning Call, an Allentown paper, for a photographer/reporter, I applied and got the job. I think it was October of that year. I thought, "Well, maybe this is even better, out getting real-life experience in photography, instead of going to an art school." So I started to work for the Morning Call on the night shift, and I think they paid me twenty-nine dollars a week at that time. It all started with Bill Tiley, who was head of the office at the time, called me in, and asked, "Can you use a camera -- a Speed Graphic?" I said, "Sure," I loaded the film holders, went out, did a job, came back and developed the film. He said, "You've got the job." That quick. I had a lot of experience with the Speed Graphic which was the type of camera they were using. They used a three and a quarter, four and a quarter, instead of the four by five, but basically it was the same camera. And that's how I started to work for the paper. And through the Morning Call, also, was when I covered the sit-down strike at No. 6 colliery. One of the photos is the first picture in the Lehigh book. That was the beginning of the mine photographs, also.

Dublin: So that was in October of '47?

Harvan: That's when I started, but that photo was taken two years later. In the meantime, I would take the camera and roam around the region and photograph the dredges along the Lehigh River and different buildings in the region on weekends. But my involvement with mine photographs started with that sit-down strike image. It was in '49.

Dublin: So your "beat," as it were, was a regional beat?

Harvan: Yes, at the branch office in Lansford here. The main office was in Allentown, but they had branch offices in Easton and this one in Lansford.

Dublin: So you worked out of the Lansford office?

Harvan: Yes. In the summer of '49, there was a violent air crash near Mt. Carmel, PA. There was fifty-six people killed. It was my day off, but when I heard about it on the radio, I got into the car and drove up to the scene and took a series of pictures of the crash and the victims, drove down to Allentown with the film, and they published the photos of the crash and gave me a big spread, by-lines, and everything else. It was right after that, they moved me to Allentown, and I worked at the main office for a while. But the assignments were not to my liking too well. You did a lot of parties, groups, and Lions Clubs officers, and things like that. There were a number of good assignments. At times you went out with the police looking for murder suspects and a few other things like that, but this was not the norm.

Dublin: A lot of it was sort of society pages?

Harvan: Yeah, and I think what soured me the most about the job was -- I think I mentioned this to you before -- about how I used the thirty-five millimeter camera on an assignment once. Very few people were using thirty-five millimeter camera in news work at the time, but Rose had one -- a Leica. In fact, that was the Leica shown in that magazine, "People Today." One day, I was sent out to do an assignment of kids in a classroom, children in kindergarten, and I took the thirty-five millimeter along and shot the assignment in available light, which was unusual for the paper. Everybody was using flash bulbs and big film, and kind of posed things. But this was a spontaneous affair, so I used the small camera. I came back and printed the job. We had an old editor called Ned McGeddigan, who was in his eighties, he had these Ben Franklin glasses on his nose, he'd look down at the pictures, looked at me, and looked down at the pictures, and looked at me, and started going through them. And in the meantime, my boss came in -- Frank Marstellar -- walked in the office. And he said, "Frank, why can't we always get pictures like this?" Frank didn't know what to say, because he had a standard formula that you had to pose everything and hold the flash off at a forty-five degree angle, you couldn't have it on the camera, it had to be off it. And that's standard, I mean, if you did vary from that, you heard about it. I guess I did the wrong thing by doing this. I didn't think I was doing anything wrong. I thought I was coming back with some good pictures.

Dublin: And the person you showed them to liked them?

Harvan: Yeah, the editor, he thought they were great. He wanted to know why he couldn't get more like these -- spontaneous pictures. Well, when I got back to the office, he told me not to ever do that again.

Dublin: He was old-school.

Harvan: Old-school, yeah. And then things started to turn negative and I didn't want to continue to work in this environment. I didn't stay there very long. They kind of persuaded me to go back to Lansford if I wanted to. In the meantime, I met Jean [Gallagher] and we started to date. And we got married and so that's another reason why I stayed around here.

Dublin: Had you known Jean at all? She didn't go to Lansford High School?

Harvan: No, she went to St. Anne's. Jean's about seven years younger than I am, and she was working at the Sharpe's news store, up on Ridge Street. When I came out of the service, I used to get a newspaper every now and then, and that's how I got to talking to her. We dated for a couple of years and then got married. We got married in '49, and a year later, we had our first child, Christopher.

Dublin: Now what was it like coming back to Lansford, after having been away? You were away from about '42 to '47. That's longer than most people were away.

Harvan: Yes, it was. The beginning was very strange. Everything seemed so small and confined. And I still wasn't over my sicknesses real well. I was having bouts with malaria and headaches. I felt real bad at times, and I really didn't know what I was going to do until I started with the newspaper. But for the first couple of months, it was strange. Like I said, when I walked into this house, the rooms looked so small, the stairs were so narrow. After being out in the big Pacific, everything looks small; it was so different.

Dublin: But you didn't have an urge -- even when the photography school, the art school, got postponed -- it sounds like you didn't actually have an urge to travel a bit or to go someplace else.

Harvan: Well, if I hadn't started with the newspaper, I probably would have gone to L.A. But as I said, in the meantime, I started to date Jean. And she didn't particularly -- she was a homebody -- she didn't want to leave. Later on, when I left the Morning Call, I started to freelance and I started to do things around town here, commercial work, etc. Ted Berger, who used to work for the Morning Call in Lansford, went to Allentown, worked for the Morning Call there, and then . . . he started his own public relations firm, and he got the coal company account, the LC&N account. Anytime he needed pictures, he would contact me, and that's how I got to go down into the mines, and especially the Coaldale collieries. . . . When he got the coal account, every time he needed pictures for annual reports, publicity, or other promotions, as I said, he would call me and tell me to go inside the mines and get whatever he needed. So that's how I got into the mines, coal companies were like other big companies, they didn't allow many photographers on their grounds. They didn't want anybody roaming around with cameras, as there were a lot of things they didn't want people to see. But this was an opportunity that I had, and that's how I was able to accumulate a fair amount of negatives when the LC&N was operating. And it wasn't that many years. It was only about four years, really.

Dublin: You're talking . . . until April of '54. You probably started, maybe around 1950, or '51. Weegee.

Harvan: Yes, so it wasn't that long, but what I did get, I was kind of fortunate, that I knew Ted. He would always call me up a few days before the shoot and tell me, "George, we've got to have this picture, or that picture. I'll meet you down in the mine's office." But the night before, he would always say, "You go down, you know what I want. I can't make it." I would meet one of the Fire Bosses -- Laird Henry, or Johnny Haughton. Ted also had a brother, Wilbur -- and they would take me around to the various sites to be photographed.

Dublin: So because you were connected with Berger, you had entree?

Harvan: Right. I also took a lot of pictures I wasn't supposed to, but I felt, as long as I'm down there, and if it looks interesting, I shot it. I used a Speed Graphic at the beginning, and it was kind of a cumbersome thing to take down in the mines, and we were using flash bulbs, which was illegal. And the flash gun had to be connected to the shutter with a relay, and sometimes your bulb would go off and then you could hear the shutter going off, and I knew that, "I lost that shot." If I had all the shots that I lost, I'd probably have twice as many negatives as I do now. You run into all kinds of conditions in the mines, especially real down deep, you know it's dirty, and dusty, and sometimes it's damp, and then your camera gets a lot of moisture on it. And when you went from hot to cold you would get condensation on the lens, and the electrical contacts didn't work properly. So it was a trial-by-error thing, as there was no books written on how to take pictures in coal mines.

Dublin: So if we look at the company's annual reports in the last few years, the chances are pretty good that any mine photo that's in there, you took.

Harvan: Oh yeah, the last four or five years. And then they had a lot of tours going in for visitors, and they also had other promotions. I remember going to Bermuda once, with a group of coal dealers. It was a pretty good company. But they did spend a lot of money wastefully. . . . I was making more money working a few days a week, maybe two days a week, than I was making at the Morning Call -- twice as much. So this was a good deal for me and it allowed me a lot of free time to do other work, to move around the area and do things on my own. I was also doing other things for a living. I had a little shop up on Bertsch Street that I rented and I made a little darkroom out of it, and I also had a little studio, and people would come in and I'd make a portrait or family picture. But I never cared much for that type of work. I did some weddings, too, when I was freelancing, I had to make a living for my family. So I did what I had to do, just having gotten married. . . . as long as the coal company was operating, I was in fine shape. I was making enough money. I was getting Philadelphia prices instead of Lansford prices. So it was a big difference, it worked out. I often wondered whether, if I did not have the opportunity to get into the coal mines, whether I would have done any photography in the coal regions at all. When I had the feeling that the mines were about to close, I started to look around for other work. I was offered a job at the National Gallery of Art in Washington as a photographer's assistant. They were opening up a photo lab, I think the Gallery just opened. What they were doing was copying paintings, putting them on cards, and also photographing any dignitaries would come through the Gallery for publicity purposes. I applied for the job, and they accepted me, in fact, they even found an apartment for me in Washington, D.C. Well, Chris was just born, he was about six months old at the time. Jean and I went down and saw the apartment, and all the way back she didn't say much. I felt she didn't want to go to Washington, so I turned that job down. That was another thing. If I'd gone to Washington, I probably wouldn't have made the coal mining pictures. It's funny, how your whole life takes various turns. You make certain decisions, and maybe it turned out for the better. You don't become rich, but perhaps you did the right thing.

Dublin: You had a life's work that has such an integrity and a core that expresses you, and also this area from which you come, and you might not have felt able to do that, photographing the art works at the National Gallery, or the visitors.

Harvan: Probably not. It was a lot different, sure. It was a different type of work. Sometimes you feel a job's a job. You have to make a living for your family. I was a little down because I was always interested in art, to a certain degree, looking at good paintings and prints. I was kind of disappointed when she didn't want to go, but maybe it worked out for the better.

Dublin: Now, in this period, did you do any formal training? Photography school, art school . . .

Harvan: I never had any training at all, Tom. I never went to a photo school -- not even to a workshop -- in my whole life.

Dublin: So you picked these skills up doing the work, working in the darkroom on your own materials?

Harvan: Yes, it was all through experience. I had this darkroom up on Bertsch Street where I had the little shop, and then I also had one down in the basement. I'd work at night, doing my personal work. I learned through experience, reading magazines and observing. I had a high school education and that was it.

Dublin: Did you become familiar with contemporary photography?

Harvan: Not at that time, no. I wasn't aware of any other photographers in Lansford, or in the coal region. About '59 or '60, I become acquainted with the New York scene, that's when I started to sell pictures to magazines. I also sold to the Saturday Evening Post in Philadelphia. At this time I became aware of other photographers. I was offered a job with Popular Photography in New York, they had an office on Park Avenue, and John Derniak was the editor. I learned from him about other photographers, like Edward Weston. I had no idea who Edward Weston was. One day he sent me up to a gallery uptown and said, "They have some Edward Westons, if you want to see good work." I asked him how my printing was, compared to other photographers, he said, "It's good. But it could be a lot better." So I went up to this gallery, where this fellow had about fifteen Westons on a wall. Weston printed all by contact, eight by ten inch prints. And I thought they were beautiful, really, absolutely beautiful, never saw anything like them and I was really impressed. These were original Westons. He was selling them for Weston, for a gallery in California, Carmel, I think. They were trying to move them in New York. But you couldn't sell photographs as art at this time. I could have purchased a Weston then for thirty-five dollars, but I didn't have the thirty-five dollars. But what I did learn then was that I could improve on my printing. But that's how I learned how to print, by looking at other original photographs. I would go to the Museum of Modern Art and look at the exhibits there, and see how photographs were presented.

Dublin: Did you find that you were able to, in fact, come back here, and as you did work in the dark room, that you would try to get some of those effects, were you trying to get that contrast?

Harvan: Not so much that, when you make a print and you might make it too gray or light, and you don't have enough body to make it effective, you feel, maybe I should print it darker, or I should print it deeper, or something like that. But you don't know this until you see another original print. You can't judge from some printing in books, which sometimes is terrible. But then you see the original print, and there's a lot more to see. That's how I learned, by studying other photographs. You talk about formal training -- that was it, looking at other, original photographs by so-called masters. Some of the Westons that I could have bought for thirty-five dollars, the pepper and the shell, they go for seventy thousand dollars now. . . .

Dublin: So when Lehigh Navigation Coal stopped mining, did that affect your ability to be a freelancer?

Harvan: Well, yeah, because I was making so much. It was great to make all this money, to make four hundred dollars a week or something like that, in those days, for maybe two days' work, was great. But when the coal company closed, the LC&N ceased operating, I had to find a job. I knew Jackie Nochton, who lived down the street here. Bethlehem Steel had two photo labs -- a real estate photo lab, and the advertising lab. He worked for the real estate lab, and informed me that, "there's an opening in the other lab." So he told me, "Why don't you go to Bethlehem Steel, and they might have a job for you." So I took some of my mine photographs to Bethlehem and met a fellow by the name of Zollie Bero, who was head of the lab. He said, "We can't use pictures like this. They're just too black, too dark." So he said, "Why don't you fill out an application and leave it here." I didn't think I'd get the job. In the meantime, a fellow came in from New York, Orlan Donaldson, who took Bero's place. I had left some of the photographs there and when he saw the photographs, he immediately called me. And this was December, I guess, of '54. He offered me the job, but he wanted me to start immediately. I said, "I can't. I can't start until after the holidays." He said, "We need you now." I said, "Well, I gotta wait until after -- I promised a lot of pictures for the holidays to people. I can start after the first of January." He said, "Well, we'll have to find someone else." I said, "Okay." But after the first, he called, and he said, "If you still want the job, come on down." So that's how I started to work with Bethlehem Steel. It was a good experience and I enjoyed it.

Dublin: Did you ever do any work in the steel mills comparable to the kind of photography you'd done in the mines?

Harvan: No, not really. I was pretty close to Orlan. He was a Columbia graduate, worked with Arthur Rothstein, he went to school with him. He knew a lot of photographers in New York City and worked with them before he came to Bethlehem. He worked with fashion photographers like Horst and Horst, and Louise Dahl Wolfe -- big fashion photographer in New York at the time. We often talked about me going into the steel mills with a small camera and recording the men working at their jobs. If they wanted a shot for an annual report or advertisement, they would dress it up. They would paint the machinery, clean it up, and stage it, more or less. Quite a few times . . . he proposed to the higher ups that I go in with a small camera and just walk around for six months, and show the men sweating, working, beat up, just as it was happening. We never did get that off the ground.

Dublin: There was someone above your boss who didn't want that kind of photography taken?

Harvan: Yes, there were a number of people above him who didn't see eye to eye with him. He was a kind of a radical type of guy. He realized this work should be done, but he couldn't do much about it. He would jeopardize -- in fact, later on, he did jeopardize his job and he was fired. Because he was, basically a strong person and he had a particular way he wanted to run the photo lab. Other people thought he should run it differently. We became very good friends. I never made that much money, really, there, but he did give me a lot of liberty -- I was like my own boss. Anytime I needed some extra film -- or other photo supplies, he said, "You could use the lab for your own work, as long as you don't sell the pictures. Any pictures you sell, you do at home." But I could experiment, order whatever I wanted. So I had a pretty good working relationship with him and I enjoyed it. It was a good experience. I did get into the plant a number of times, and being as I was familiar with the thirty-five millimeter camera, I would go out and photograph bridges being built, and I would get men up on bridges actually working, instead of posing them. The advertising people really liked the photos. Later on, the other photographers started to switch from big cameras to smaller formats. When I first went to Bethlehem Steel, they were using eight by ten cameras. And then later on four by five. Then they moved on to 120 roll film, and finally to thirty-five millimeter. I got them to use the thirty-five millimeter format. At the time, they were still making lantern slides on glass plates. They were like three and a quarter by four and a quarter. I convinced them, "We're wasting time, making slides for shows on glass. Let's put them on thirty five." He allowed me to go out and buy some Leica cameras, and we did switch. Like I say, it was a good experience.

Dublin: How long did you work for Bethlehem Steel?

Harvan: Well, I worked about twenty-five years, but I did a lot of things in-between, in my spare time. If I would go to do a job for Bethlehem Steel, like, in Lancaster County, I made sure that I photographed Lancaster County with my own camera.

Dublin: That's when you did the Amish?

Harvan: I started to, yeah. If did a job on wire rope or something, around the collieries or mines, I'd always shoot other things on my own, but Orlan allowed it. He didn't care, in fact, he encouraged me. Arthur Rothstein was in Bethlehem and he said, "Arthur is coming up to the lab so bring in some of your photographs. I want to show them to him." At the time, he had retired from Look magazine, and was now the editor of Infinity magazine. It was a magazine put out by the association for magazine photographers, and he was in charge. It was a nice, classy magazine. He really liked the photographs. He put one on the cover with about ten inside of the last issue printed. It was only through my boss's efforts, who suggested to me to bring in the photographs that I was able to get the photos published. He encouraged me to exhibit my photographs, I could print them at the lab, as long as I didn't sell them, but I could exhibit them.

Dublin: So it was really a nice environment for you.

Harvan: Sure . . . if I was late in the morning, I had no problem. And if I stayed late and wanted to do some printing, I had no problem doing so.

Dublin: And what was the formal work that you did for Bethlehem?

Harvan: I did everything photographically. I did portraits of the big bosses, photos for annual reports. Orlan thought I could do portraits better than anybody else, so I had to do most of the portraits. And, later on, when we got into slide shows -- they didn't know how to put the shows together, copy art work and other duplication. So I did a lot of that work. But I would go out on assignments. We would go into a soft coal mine. That was another thing -- we'd go down with maybe two or three other people, and then we would string up a bunch of lights, and before we got through with it, it looked like a living room. They wanted to show a certain type of machinery in the mine, well-lit.

Dublin: Did you do a little bit of shooting, in that period, of Bethlehem mines here in the Panther Valley? Because they bought the mines after the mid-'60s or so.

Harvan: Yes. I did a whole series on the wire ropes, and the buildings here, and the strippings, the trucks. It was nothing really to speak of. When you work for a big company, with art directors, they have a certain way they want pictures taken, and you couldn't much deviate from it. If you tried to do it your way, they would let you know, "Well, that's not what we want." It's not like working for yourself. When you do a series of pictures on your own, you do them to suit yourself. You let your own feelings come through as much as possible.

Dublin: But it did give you that freedom to do your own work.

Harvan: I thought I had a pretty good few years. I never regretted working there.

Dublin: Now what was it like here in Lansford, as the mines closed? Can you recall your general feel for the community and for your various high school classmates and friends who were in town? How would you describe the place?

Harvan: You see, by that time, I went to Bethlehem, and I was spending most of my time -- I was still living here, but many times I would stay at the YMCA, mostly in the wintertime. I was kind of losing track of things around the coal regions. Up until the time when the men opened up Lanscoal in '60. Then I started to get a little more interested in what they were doing. I knew most of them, all the miners. And at that time, I felt I should photograph all I can, of, the miners. I kind of realized, one of these days, it's all going to be gone -- completely. And then they opened Lanscoal -- in '60. They worked two years before they got any coal mined. And then for that ten years I went in No. 9 quite a few times to record the miners.

Dublin: Between 1960 and 1972, there was really just one underground mine operating in the Panther Valley, and that was the No. 9 mine, Lanscoal. Do you want to talk about how you got involved with that?

Harvan: Yes, as I mentioned before, I got the feeling then that I should continue photographing the miners. Eventually I knew they would discontinue deep mining in the valley. So, every opportunity I got -- vacation time, weekends, Saturdays -- if they were in, I would go in. As I said, I knew most of them personally. They were my age -- maybe a few years older. My relationship with those miners was very close, so I had free rein. I could take all types of pictures. I could walk in on them anytime. They knew what I was doing. And that was a very great benefit to me, to get realistic pictures, not posed pictures -- pictures of actual working conditions. Lanscoal started, with four men: Joe "Muggy" Oriel, Johnny Zuzu, Stevie Zalleha, and Stevie Karabinos. They all had various degrees of expertise in different things. Karabinos was a bookkeeper and payroll clerk. Zalleha was the manager. Johnny worked inside the mines with Muggy on the outside. They formed Lanscoal and hired a few men. I think they had about twenty men working for them, at one time. When they started they had a lot of cleaning up to do in the mine to make it workable again. It took them two years, and then they finally started to produce coal. They hired guys like Mike Sabron, Johnny Matyka, "Gimbo" Geusic, Johnny Vadyak, Mike Sotak, and a few others. They really had a good group, and like I said, being a contemporary of them, I was more or less able to go in any time to photograph. I would see Stevie Karabinos and say, "I want to go in today." He'd say, "Sign the paper, and get your miner's lamp, and put some mining clothes on." I used to walk in the gangway many times. It would take me fifteen or twenty minutes, but eventually I'd get to the place where they were working, that's how far they were in. If I wanted to go up the chutes with them, I had no problem. If they were drilling, I would join in also. When they were loading coal, I recorded that operation. This was a good relationship. If I would have had more time off from work, I could have done a lot more work in the mine. But I was since working at the Steel, and I was just doing photography on off days. I was fortunate, I was getting five weeks vacation at the Steel, so I did have some time to spend down in the mines. I would say seventy-five percent of my mine photographs were done in those ten years.

Dublin: And could you get a different kind of photograph in that period than you'd been able to get in the LC&N period? Inside the Mine. Inside the Mine.

Harvan: Yes. At that time, too, strobe lighting came into vogue -- strobe lighting, and thirty-five millimeter cameras. I could use my Rolleiflex, or I could switch to the thirty-five millimeter camera. I could be more flexible. I could move around more freely. I could crawl in tight places and shoot more. Instead of making ten or twelve pictures in a day, I could do thirty, forty or fifty. It all depended on how long I was in the mine. I would go in sometimes, early in the morning, wouldn't come out until they came out at two o'clock. I wouldn't be shooting all the time, but you were always looking and observing and seeing situations you might record. They did not have the large coal veins to work in as the miners did in the sixth level in No. 8, with its huge caverns, like working the Mammoth vein. They weren't down that far to reach the Mammoth. They were only in the water level. However, you did get the feeling and the atmosphere of a coal mine -- the clothes they wore, the work itself, the way they acted when they came out. They enjoyed each other's traits, they cursed each other at times, but they always had a strong feeling for each other. They seemed to enjoy their work. I think when they started, everybody got the same amount of pay -- twenty dollars a day. No matter what you did, you got twenty dollars a day, and that was it.

Dublin: I also got the feeling from interviewing people that they really had to do all the jobs. There wasn't much of a division of labor.

Harvan: Oh, no.

Dublin: Everybody was a miner, everybody was a loader.

Harvan: That's right. For instance, they could all run the mine motor. If they had to do some carpentry work, they did that. Timbering -- they did the timbering, loading -- everything -- firing shots, whatever.

Dublin: They'd had a lot more support services when they were with LC&N.

Harvan: Yes. They had the buddy system. As a contract miner at LC&N, your helper did a lot of the drudgery work. The contract miner was the boss of his own little domain and was better paid.

Dublin: And that had changed pretty much by the Lanscoal period.

Harvan: Yeah. They would ship the coal to the breaker, in Tamaqua, and it would be processed there.

Dublin: And that would have been the Greenwood breaker?

Harvan: Yes. Every Friday afternoon, they would have a party. That was standard procedure. They would buy a couple cases of beer, and some cold cuts, and bread and enjoy the labors of the past week. Maybe they'd bring out some golf clubs and hit some golf balls -- for a couple of hours every Friday they would have a grand time. When they finally closed, I missed this time a lot. I don't know if I felt it more than they did -- because I was involved in photographing it, knowing that I would never be able to witness this event again. I'm sure they also missed it, but they missed it in a different way than I did.

Dublin: They were also getting up closer to retirement.

Harvan: Yes. Some of them were getting pretty old. Well, Johnny Zuzu died shortly after. He was still alive when they closed.

Dublin: My recollection is, also, that they were down to ten or twelve miners. It started in the twenties, but by the end, they were down to about half that number.

Harvan: Yes, ten or twelve. Most of them had black lung -- like Paulie Petrich who was a real good worker. I have a number of pictures of him drilling. He just deteriorated in a short time. He couldn't breathe; he died very quickly. But some of them are still going, like Mike Sabron. He's still going strong. Johnny Matyka died last year.

Dublin: Do you think that was a profit-making project?

Harvan: They made money. They made money -- not much, but they were able to continue for about ten years.

Dublin: The guys got their investment back from the two years?

Harvan: I think so. And then people say twenty dollars in '60 was a lot of money. I don't think it was for the work they did.

Dublin: Well, let's think about it. They might have worked 200 days a year, or do you think they really could have worked a whole year?

Harvan: Oh yeah, they worked the whole year.

Dublin: Well, then, you're talking about 250 days a year, so that's five thousand dollars. That's a pretty decent salary at that point in time.

Harvan: And they were all local people. They didn't have to drive forty or fifty miles to work. Stanley Stanek had a job in Stroudsburg with a construction firm and quit -- came down here worked for less money. He said, "I didn't want to drive, and I enjoy this more, and I enjoy the fellows much better." Mining, to a lot of people, looked like a dirty job, but a lot of the miners, they seemed to enjoy it. They accepted the challenge of mining coal.

Dublin: When people describe the work, whether it's Tom Strohl or Mike Sabron, describing the work -- they really took a lot of pride in it, and they were good at it. No one told them what to do. They solved problems out there, in the chute, figuring out how to do it. They had to have quite diverse skills, woodworking as well as blasting, as well as hauling.

Harvan: They had to overcome the dangerous element also . . . They had to learn how to be careful. That was another good experience for me.

Dublin: Now, at that point in your life, what is connecting you back again with the Panther Valley and Lansford?

Harvan: Well, like I said, I didn't concentrate on mining photos all the time. There were other projects I did in the meantime. We mentioned about looking at the photographs of Hiroshima and the devastation and how they affected me later on. Well, in the early '60s, I was selling a lot of pictures to magazines -- Photography, Modern Photography, and I had some in Look and Life. So I was supplementing my income with other freelance work. My boss at Steel thought it was great that somebody in his lab could sell a picture to the Saturday Evening Post and get five hundred dollars for it. I talked about the pictures of the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima. Much later, I used to walk along the river of the Lehigh River, with my children, Christopher and Christine. And as the late light would skim across the rocks, they would take on various shapes and forms. They started to take on another meanings, and after living with them many weekends over a couple years, they became associated with living things to me, these still rocks. I started to collect them and photograph them, and that's how I wrote that piece, "After the Fire," which revealed what this earth would look like if civilization was demolished and only the images that remained were these frozen on the rocks. After the fire. "After the Fire" If one came from another planet and see these rocks, his reaction would be that "this is what an animal looked like, how a newborn child appeared, and this was what a skull was shaped like." I found all these images in rocks. I have them in this case here. Someday, we'll have to go through them all. At first, when they were on exhibit in New York City, at the Kodak Center in New York City, I didn't title them as "After the Fire." I just called them "Rock Faces." I had a nice review in the New York Times. Jacob Deschin gave me two pictures in the art section.

Dublin: About what date would this be, do you think?

Harvan: That was in the early '60s. Then a person from Kodak that had ran the gallery at the Grand Central Station exhibit -- wanted to have them in their Fifth Avenue Showroom. So they also were used there. They also were having a big show in the Coliseum in New York, so I had to take them to the city again. So I had three showings in New York with these pictures. Then I changed the theme of the photos a few years later, maybe about four or five years later. Cedar Crest [College] in Allentown wanted to show some pictures of mine in one of their galleries, that's when I wrote "After the Fire." I tied it in with the atomic bomb. In the 60s, people were building bomb shelters, the cold war was on and they were just afraid. There was all this talk about the atomic bomb. You look back now, a lot of it was exaggerated. It was a scare tactic. I just saw a cartoon the other day, just about a week or so ago. Some woman said, "I think it's time now, we could close up the bomb shelter." Some of these rock pictures are really scary; you can see the various images I described.

Dublin: So you were viewing them almost like fossils?

Harvan: Yes.

Dublin: As if it were the imprint of life before the fire.

Harvan: Yes. I could read the piece for you sometime. Maybe we could put it on tape, that little thing I wrote. Who started this, why was it started, why were all these people killed, this reaction is from someone who came from another place. How did it happen, what caused it? Is this what the people looked like? Was this the look of animals? This is what a worm looked like? That's what all these rocks photos were all about. I guess, of all the pictures I've taken, these have probably affected me more emotionally than anything, really. I mean, they had a greater effect than the Amish pictures or the mannequins or other projects, even the miners.

Dublin: It's interesting to hear you talk, and I'm also aware of the piece you wrote for the Lehigh University Art Galley catalog. It seems like there's a part of you that is a very creative writer -- that's part of what I think has affected you about those photographs is also that you wrote about it. That's the way you tell it now.

Harvan: As I said, when they first came out, they were as just plain rock faces. But I knew there was more to them than that, than plain faces. There should be a tie to something else. And then I relayed it back to the explosion at Hiroshima. "After the Fire" was just putting some words down to a set of pictures, tying them in to the photographs. I tried to find a reason why I took the pictures, why I felt this way. We could go through some of these pictures sometime. My collection of rock pictures was made along the Lehigh River, down at Jim Thorpe, and Palmerton. Some of the students at Cedar Crest made written comments which were incredible -- their feelings about the show. They felt the same way I did about the rocks.

Dublin: This was sort of the mid- to the late-'60s by the time that exhibit occurred?

Harvan: Yes. When I would get into a project, I'd stay on it for one or two years -- for how long it took. I would follow it through to completion. When I started the Amish series, it was the same way. Every chance, I'd get, whether vacation time or weekends, I would head for the Lancaster area. I would find newspapers that listed Amish auctions, or other affairs pertaining to the Amish. This would give me some leads on where to go to make photographs. I had a number of pictures published with Grace Hoyer, who is John Updike's mother. We did a piece on the Amish: she did the story and I made the photographs for Travel and Camera. I also did photos for Liberty magazine. I always photographed the Amish with respect. I never shoved my camera in their faces. They don't particularly like people photographing them. So I either did it with a long lens, which is kind of sneaky in a way, or a hidden camera. I don't think they minded it so much, as long as the camera wasn't exposed and they weren't exposed to the camera.

Dublin: So you were less obtrusive?

Harvan: Yes, I was. In fact John Hofmier, he was an Amish man who left the group and became the editor of Liberty magazine. When he saw some of my photographs, he said I did them with a certain amount of class. It made me feel good, because I didn't want to invade anyone's privacy just to make a photograph. But you get the feeling that everything about them is unique and the people in their way dignified, their way of dressing, their way of life is so different. When you get into photography seriously, you sometimes feel you should pursue certain subjects. But you've got to do it with a certain amount of respect for the people you decide to photograph. I enjoyed doing pictures of the Amish very much.

Dublin: This seems like a very interesting period of your life because you had the security of a regular job, and yet the independence, at times, of a freelance photographer. Not as much as if you had been a full-time freelancer, but with the kind of security that you wouldn't have had.

Harvan: Yes. And I was able to use the facilities at the Steel if I wanted to make big prints. I have some Amish prints that are twenty by twenty-fours. You see, I couldn't do that at home. I could do it at the lab. There was no problem. I was also able to use different films to experiment with. Just the other day, a fellow brought in a picture taken of the old No. 8 Colliery -- made well over a hundred years ago -- 1860s, 1870s. Very faded -- you could hardly see it. But by being able to use a certain film, I was able to get a beautiful picture of it. I learned to use this film at the lab. . . .

Dublin: So you were going to tell me about the mannequin project.

Harvan: That was another project I started in the '60s. One weekend, I was walking up near the east end of Lansford, up near the radio station, between Lansford and Nesquehoning. Fauzio Brothers had a strip mine in the area. Near the dirt road a large shed stood, looked like a large garage for trucks. I used to pass it frequently, and wonder what was in it. One Saturday I just happened to open the door and I saw this beat up old car in there, and in the front seat was a mannequin, a woman mannequin. It kind of startled me. The way the light fell on the mannequin, it almost looked like a real person, sitting there behind the wheel of this battered car. I opened the door and took some pictures of the mannequin sitting in the front seat of this car. I came home and developed them and I was pleased with the results. The next week I went back to the shed, but the mannequin was gone. I was kind of disappointed as I wanted to take some more pictures, but the thing disappeared. So I go out, and roamed around the area, and I found the mannequin laying in the grass, and someone had put a hole right through the mannequin's head -- a bullet hole. I guess they were using it for target practice. So I took some more pictures. This happened every few weeks or so. I'd go back, it would either be changed, or it was the same place, or I would move it. It all depended on the lighting and the conditions. Well, this was the summer. This project continued into the fall. When the rain fell on it, the plaster started to come off a bit by bit, and it started to crack in places. I then photographed it into the winter. The snow covered it, and the weeds would fall on top of it, wherever they fell, it made a different image. Of course, in all this time, it was deteriorating more and more, pieces were falling off. When it would rain again, you could almost see the tears coming down the face, water flowing down the face, and then during the winter with the cold and snow, it deteriorated a lot more, it started to really fall apart. I followed it into the spring, and by that time, it was starting to become less of a mannequin, just a shell of what it once was. The following summer, someone had thrown it on the dirt road, and I guess a car ran over it, and almost flattened it out. That final picture, when it was laying in this puddle of water, it almost looked like the thing was rising, like it was rising in the air. What gave that effect was the reflection of the sky in the water. It almost felt like the mannequin was elevating. I made hundreds of photographs in the course of the year. The deterioration of the mannequin was almost like the deterioration of a human being. We go through various stages of our life. We're born, we live, we're young and healthy, we're strong and look good in the spring of our lives. Then we go into the summer of our life, the middle. At a certain point, we start to head downhill, to the fall and the winter of our lives. It reminded me -- the deterioration of this mannequin -- that of our life as we live it. While the deterioration of the mannequin happened in one season, it takes us years to do it. These are the kind of projects that make photography really interesting, when you get involved with something like this, emotionally and over a period of time, they get you to think.

Dublin: You're really talking about the human condition. You're not talking about a mannequin.

Harvan: No. I'm talking about the human condition, how we deteriorate through the years, physically. I'm not talking mentally. Physically, how we don't look as good at sixty, as we did when we were twenty, that's for sure. That was another project that took me a little over a year to do. As I said, I have hundreds of pictures of that series; I have printed maybe about twenty that tell the story of the demise of a mannequin.

Dublin: Did a set of that appear as an exhibit appear somewhere?

Harvan: No, never. If they ever do the half-hour feature of my work . . . I definitely want to include another project that I worked on for a long time, photographing Civil War battlefields, like Gettysburg and Antietam and Charlottesville. I had a Volkswagen camper at the time and I used to take off for two, three days, four days and photograph Civil War battlefields. I would usually get up early in the morning when no tourists were out in the fields as it was the only time I could do some decent work. That was the time when you would actually get to feel the action that happened during the battle. Since you knew a little bit about how the battles were fought, you could almost hear the guns, the cries of the wounded, the horses being shot.

Dublin: So you did some reading, also, about the battles?

Harvan: Oh, sure. But that's how you get decent photos. You have to get involved emotionally, other than that, they're just shells of images -- nothing, really. But you have to get involved, totally involved. In fact, there would be days when I didn't make any pictures, and I would feel bad. If I would go and spend a weekend working and felt that I hadn't made a good picture, I would actually feel down. In the Civil War battlefield pictures, I did them with a lot of motion where I moved the camera or threw the lens out of focus, that way I got a lot of movement into the statues. They have so many monuments in Gettysburg, just to photograph them realistically didn't mean much to me. So I changed my way of seeing them. I would move the camera, or I would knock it out of focus a little bit, or use the zoom lens. I would make the figures into death masks, like the participants were actually dying at the time. Or I would photograph a hand with water dripping from it. It almost looked like blood coming out of the fingers. There was a lot of things you could do with a little imagination. You can change things. You don't have to point a lens at something and take it the way it is. You have to see a little beyond the surface.

Dublin: You have to give your interpretation, you have to make it part of your vision and not just the absolute denotation of what it physically is.

Harvan: Yes. And, at that time in my life, I think I was at the peak of my creativity. It almost seemed like I could go anywhere and take good pictures. You could almost feel like you could go out in a field of grass and come back with outstanding pictures. But it didn't last long -- there's only a certain period where it really happens at its fullest. It never really leaves you, but . . . as you get involved in other pursuits -- you can't donate all the time to photography as you would like, so you lose it to an extent. Oh, and then I did a series of pictures about country auctions, in the Dutch country. That was very interesting. I concentrated mostly on faces, the Pennsylvania Dutch. You know, this part of the country has a lot of auctions, and in the '60s and early '70s, there was a lot of farm auctions. When they would advertise a farm sale, it gave you the opportunity to roam around people's farms and see their homes and barns and sometimes meet the people who lived there.

Dublin: So these are, for instance, cases where people are dying. Their children don't really want to run the farm anymore; they have to divide the things among them.

Harvan: That's right, yeah. There was so many beautiful farms and so many interesting people who came to the public sales. The older people, their expressions and moods, you would record, and their dress, and the way they reacted to the auction, generally.

Dublin: Would the people attending the auctions be mostly the Pennsylvania Dutch, or were there a lot of tourists and others looking for antiques?

Harvan: There were people looking for antiques, antique dealers, there also were collectors, but mostly there were a lot of the Pennsylvania Dutch around. They were easy to pick out as they spoke, and still speak Pennsylvania Dutch. It was kind of interesting. You couldn't understand them, but you got the flavor of what they were saying. Then you could tie in the people with outside people, or maybe you'd see an old Pennsylvania Dutch woman with a young girl, the contrast between the two. I worked on this project for years, off and on. You didn't do this every weekend, but every now and then you got an opportunity to see a good farm auction. I went to Kutztown and around Reading and Virginville, and the Lancaster area. As I said, it was kind of interesting. These are the type of projects that you pick and shoot the way you want to, and there's no one telling you how to do it, or how not to do it. And that ties in your previous statement, that I was able to do a lot of freelance work, and I wasn't really doing this to sell these pictures. I was just doing it for my self-satisfaction.

Dublin: So you would sell some, but it wasn't the reason you did it?

Harvan: No. In fact, I never really attempted to exploit them, really.

Dublin: Did your work take a different turn once the No. 9 mine closed down, once Lanscoal stopped being in operation? In terms of the kind of work you did, or the kind of projects you came up with?

Harvan: Yeah, well, some of these projects were in the works when Lanscoal was still operating. They operated until '72. While I was taking the mine pictures, I was working on auction pictures or something like that. I was very fortunate I was able to do this too, because Jean understood what I was up to, and would allow me to take pictures, whenever I wished. I was fortunate I was able to complete most of my projects, and that was another thing that worked in my favor.

Dublin: She was obviously supportive.

Harvan: Yes. You do what you feel you have to, and if you have to do it, you do it. And I did have to do it. Photography was an important part of my life. Sometimes, it's hard to say why. You often feel, "What is so important about taking pictures?" But there is a certain something you have to get out of your system, so you make photographs. I think because I felt this way, I had to follow my feelings. This was how I was able to make the mine photographs. If I didn't have that desire, I surely wouldn't have made them. Maybe it's something you're born with. Perhaps, I was born to take pictures, I don't know.

Dublin: As a historian, I can appreciate that. Good historians are driven. I want to understand this history. I want to get the story right and share it with other people, and you want to get this story while you can. The oral history has that aspect to it. And it cuts you off at various times.

Harvan: I think so. You're driven. And you feel if you weren't doing it, that you were kind of negligent with whatever talent was given you. You should do the work.

Dublin: Do you also sometimes have the feeling that if you don't do it, it won't be done?

Harvan: Well, in a way.

Dublin: There's certainly that aspect of it, too. You bring a certain perspective to it, your talents.

Harvan: Well, there's a certain way you see pictures that no one else can see. If you write a story, only you could write it. No one else can do it for you. I don't want to be boastful, but I know there's a lot of images that I see that people don't see. First of all, you train yourself and it's just the way you feel about objects and life in general. The photos of Gettysburg, and the mannequin -- who would have the desire to follow a mannequin around for a whole year, in all kinds of weather? Like photographing a mannequin laying in the snow, with a reed across the face. Yeah, if I hadn't done it, a good number of photographs would not exist. They exist now. It's not an earth-shaking thing, but it's something that I accomplished. That's about the extent of it. Nothing's really that important to every individual, I'm sure there are some people who care less about them.

Dublin: But then you can see it as part of your own development.

Harvan: But then you wonder, how much do you develop as a photographer? I look at the Japanese pictures; I feel they're just as good as the ones I take now. You know, they were done in the '40s, and you ask yourself, "How much have you really progressed, or are you the same person just doing another project?" Technically, I feel I've learned a lot. Artistically, I don't know.

Dublin: You couldn't do the kind of restoring of the mine pictures then, that you can do now.

Harvan: No. That's what I said, technically you progressed. Well, films and cameras and lenses and other equipment have gotten so much better now, and it's a lot easier, too, to a certain extent. But much is too easy now. With automation a lot is done for you. You can now use a modern camera and come back most times with a perfect negative. Years back, every negative wasn't perfect and sometimes the ones that weren't perfect made the best prints. Perhaps they were thin, and they just brought in certain highlights or details. That made them different. I think the new cameras with the automatic exposures, if you don't vary the exposure and change it, you're going to come up with sameness, static image, all the time.

Dublin: So there's something in modern photography that works against the kind of range of skills. Harvan: Yes. I wouldn't have attempted some projects where I made my own cameras. I have made 8x10 and 4x5 cameras. I would find pieces of old cameras and when I was unable to buy a certain type of camera to fill a need, I would then construct a functional camera. Perhaps I would need a camera with a wide angle lens. I would make a lightweight box and put a certain lens on it, most of them worked out in different situations. I have made a few cameras. I got into making pinhole cameras. Pinhole photography is a unique type of photography. You're taking pictures with no lenses, shutter, or film, just the small pinhole, a piece of paper instead of film for the negative. It's a very mysterious type of photography, most of the time you never know what you're going to get. The only time you really know what you have photographed is when you run this paper through the tray of developer. It doesn't look like anything you witnessed because with this type of camera, you get a panoramic effect, and everything is distorted. Ordinary things become majestic -- sometimes weird. I have gotten a little better in judging situations through the years.

Dublin: So when you say you do it on paper, you do it on photographic paper?

Harvan: Yes.

Dublin: Rather than putting it on negative and transferring it.

Harvan: Well, with some of my cameras I made, the paper is ten by fourteen, or close to it. You can get ten by fourteen inch film, but you'd go broke buying it. So instead of putting film in the camera, I use an ordinary piece of photo paper as a receiver of the image. Then you get a negative print. From that negative print you contact it and make the final positive print. Actually, you expose light through the paper to get a print. The photographer, Talbot, who was a pioneer in photography, made all his negatives on paper, on a salt paper, which was then printed on to another piece of paper to make a positive.

Dublin: You need an apprentice.

Harvan: Do I? [laughs]

Dublin: You need a twenty-five year old would-be photographer that you can pass this all on to.

Harvan: Perhaps, give these cameras to someone. There's three or four cameras in the case, there, that I made. That's an eight by ten camera. You see how close that lens is to the film? Well, that's how it stays, and I get a round image on an eight by ten piece of film. When George Eastman came out with his first camera, the No. 1 Kodak, it was loaded in the factory. After you exposed the roll, you sent it back to Rochester, N.Y. When the prints came back, they were round, because lenses don't give you an oblong image or a square image--the lens is round, so you get a circular image. So Kodak sent you a round picture or the entire image, 3 ½" in diameter. I got to thinking, "Why can't I make a circular image on an eight by ten piece of film, using a wide-angle lens to get a round image." I just did a series last summer in Eckley, with that eight by ten camera. I now am working on a series made with a 4x5 camera, using the same technique, most of those will be made using fallen flags in the GAR Cemetery, Summit Hill.

Dublin: So you end up printing it as a round image, and the rest stays white?

Harvan: I leave it in its true form, it will go black because your negative, it's transparent, and when you print it, the light will go through the transparent area and the print will go black.

Dublin: So it will be a black circular frame around the picture?

Harvan: Yes. That format takes you way back to 1888, when Eastman came out with their original Kodak.

10m24s

Thomas Dublin

George Harvan

"I think to be a documentary photographer you, more or less, observe life and observe what's going on about you, constantly. Whether you want to write, photograph it, or paint it. I think you've got to experience life deeply."

Dublin: Last time we talked about a fair number of George Harvan's photography projects over the years, and today George will tie this up, by talking about some of the projects that he did.

Harvan: Each time I went to New York, in the early 60s, I was selling pictures to magazines or I had to take them in to show them around. Often they'd call me and and ask me to bring pictures in. I always took my camera with me. When I was through with my business in New York, I started photographing people on the streets of the city. I was fascinated with the people of New York, how they scurried from one place to the next, almost oblivious to each other. I felt that I should try to record the lives of people living on the streets. I often wondered where they were going and what was on their mind. I would take two or three rolls of film, usually, when I worked well into the night. I did a lot of shooting around the Port Authority area, as that's where I got the bus to go home. I photographed in that general area, also around Times Square and Fifth Avenue, and up Sixth Avenue. At first, I made the photographs kind of straight on. I was trying to get sharp, realistic images. The camera was very unobtrusive. In other words, I hid it the best I could. I usually shot from the hip. Unless it was something that I could see and photograph and capture without drawing too much attention. Then I then put the camera up to my eye. But most of the pictures I shot from the hip, or from the front of me. And that way, I was able to get more spontaneous results. As I moved along deeper in this project, I started to move more and more into the abstract, and I did this by using slower shutter speeds. Then I was getting images -- figures that didn't even look like human beings anymore. They were taking on dual shapes and different forms, especially later at night when it got a little darker, and the light was falling, and I was shooting at much slower shutter speeds- -- like maybe a fifteenth of a second, or sometimes a half of a second. I was quite pleased with those pictures. I never did anything, really, with them, but I always thought that was another nice project that I was able to complete, and show some results.

Dublin: Do you have any thoughts, thinking back on it, how that project compared to your Tokyo work, before you left Japan? Because it was also city streets.

Harvan: It was very different, though, because in Tokyo I really wanted to show the face of people, and the people in Tokyo -- perhaps not all of them, but most of them knew I was taking their picture. I could stand in the middle of the pavement, and if I saw somebody coming toward me that I wanted to photograph, I had no intention of hiding the camera. I didn't fear, at that time, that I should because there was no one going to bother me. But sometimes if you point a camera at a person in New York, and if you don't know who you're pointing it at, you better be very careful. And then the results were so different -- different types of photographs.

Dublin: So there was a fair evolution in that group of photos, from when you started doing New York in just straight photographic, to being a bit more expressive.

Harvan: Right. You try to show the people in New York as they moved along the streets. Well, they were different type of people, also. As I said before, people scurrying around, going to different places -- home, work -- it seemed like everybody tried passing each other. I, sometimes, tilted the camera, so instead of having straight, uniform images, I'd have them cocked a bit, people walking on angles. It worked out quite well.

Dublin: So, what other projects, after the New York one, do you have in your portfolio?

Harvan: I think we should mention the work I did on the Molly Maguires, for Paramount Pictures. When Paramount came into this area to do the movie, they selected Eckley as one of their prime shooting places. Joe Boyle and I -- Joe Boyle was the editor of the Times News in Jim Thorpe at the time, in fact he owned it with his sister Gertrude -- decided to visit Eckley to see what was going on. They were in the process, then, of digging up the streets, and taking down all the wires to make this into a 1870 mine-patch town. And I started photographing the town, as it evolved into a movie set. And when Paramount people arrived, and when they first started to shoot at Eckley, I also took some still pictures of the sets. A few days later, I took my results and showed them to the PR person, and he remarked, "these are nothing unusual. Our photographer can do things like this." Well, I guess he was right. So, I went home and back into the darkroom. I dug out my grain screen -- it's a screen that you put down over your print, as you're exposing it. It gives you a real dirty, old look, a rough look. So I printed up a dozen or so photographs, and took them back up to the same person, and he said, "Well, now these are different." And as they were shooting the different scenes at Eckley, I was able to get close on each set. From that group of pictures, I compiled enough pictures so that I was able to put out a book on the Molly Maguires, a couple years afterward. The photos were shot in '67. I put the book out in '69. The photographs have that old nostalgic look to them, because of the grain screen. When the movie came out, and was going to be shown across the country, they used some of my photographs in their advance brochure, which they printed in black and white. The movie was done in color, but they printed the brochure in these stark black and white pictures. I remember reading a review in Argosy magazine, out of Chicago, I think. The fellow who did the writing couldn't wait to see the movie. He thought he was going see a great black and white movie, with the theme of the Molly Maguires, and their history. He was really looking forward to seeing the movie. When he walked into the theater, and it came on, and saw bright colors, he was disappointed and even thought he was in the wrong theater. He felt that if there was ever a movie that should have been shot in black and white, it should have been this one on the Molly Maguires. Like I said, with the theme of murders and labor violence, and intrigue, they kind of prettied it up. I found out later on they did it for television rights. It seems they get more to show a color film on television than they do a black and white one. But I got to know Richard Harris and Sean Connery and Samantha Egger and Marty Ritt, the director, and other supporting people.

Dublin: What did you think about how that film interpreted the story?

Harvan: I was a little disappointed in it. I would have liked to have seen more scenes, when they were arrested, and in jail, and how they were coping with life in jail. Of course, some of the mine scenes, too, weren't very realistic. I imagine, for most people who never were in a mine, it never bothered them, but it bothered me. There was no mine scenes that were shot in this part of the country. The sets were made in Hollywood from photos and drawings. That's where all the indoor mine scenes were shot. And they looked it, too. I think if they could have used a real mine, like the No. 9 mine here, and filmed the mud and the dirt and everything else a deep mine reveals, they would have been much better off.

Dublin: My recollection, as I saw the movie some years ago, is that it makes an awful lot of this love affair. So much of it turns around a love affair, rather than turning around issues of discrimination or class differences. It loses the edge that the Molly Maguires had.

Harvan: Yes, it lost a lot of the flavor of the times. There was so much history written about the men, when they were awaiting trials, and they were awaiting execution, and the condition of the cells, the condition of the towns, the people, how they were reacting -- how the media was against the condemned men, it seemed everybody on the street was against them. Well, it wasn't a meaningful film. I imagine it was an entertaining movie to some.

Dublin: I know I was disappointed with how they handle it, and the feeling that it's not going to be made again very soon. So the opportunity was lost.

Harvan: And at the time, they spent a lot of money making it. I don't know what it cost -- sixteen or seventeen million -- which was a lot at that time. I expected something better.

Dublin: And it was Sean Connery and Samantha Egger. They had some of the leading film stars of the time.

Harvan: Oh, sure, and Richard Harris. And Marty Ritt at the time, was one of the top-notch directors. So you had the people. James Wong Howe did the photography, and he's a legend in Hollywood. They had good people there. But the script didn't tell the story as it should have. It was written from a book by Arthur Lewis. Well, anyway, the pictures that I took -- the pictures that I used in the book were actually not set pictures. They were photos that I took between takes and down time. From this group, I was able to compile enough images to go with song ballads from George Korson's book, The Minstrels of the Mine Patch, portions which I used underneath the pictures, and it worked out. The printing's not that great, but adequate.

Dublin: So what you did, in a sense, is you told the story of the Mollies on your own, through this re-creation, when they were shooting on the set, and from the folklore.

Harvan: In the early part of the book, I used a lot of newspaper clippings, and told the real story as it unfolded. But I think what the photos revealed was the costumes of the period -- the children, and how they and the women dressed, and the miners' clothes in and out of work. That way, I was able to go along with stories and mine ballads. I mean, the sets were ready-made for me.

Dublin: Are there drawings from that time period? For instance, would like a Harper's Illustrated, or would Frank Leslie's Illustrated News have covered this event?

Harvan: I never saw any. I have never seen any photographs of the original Molly Maguire trials, or anything. The only pictures I have seen were taken by George Bretz, and they were portraits of the condemned men, in Pottsville.

Dublin: Oh, he did do that?

Harvan: Oh, yes. George Bretz was a Pottsville commercial photographer, and he did portraits of the Mollies in Pottsville, but after the hangings in Pottsville, his studio caught fire, and he lost all of the original negatives. The only thing that remained of this work were some of the pictures that people had purchased. He made cabinet type cards. It's too bad, what a waste. I mean, it's a large part of history lost. We have got a pretty good idea what Campbell, Doyle, and Kelly and others looked like from these photographs, but that's about it. George Bretz was an interesting photographer. He was the first photographer to photograph inside of a coal mine, and that was in the Kohinoor Colliery, at Shenandoah. Lantern slides appear to be the major survivor of most of Bretz's work, because I understand he used to go around to different community functions like those at fire halls, and he would show the slides and charge admission. I think he had a group of these lantern slides in his wagon that weren't destroyed by the fire. These slides are at the University of Maryland [Baltimore County] in their collection.

Dublin: It was from those lantern slides that they made the prints in the book.

Harvan: That's right. In fact, Lance [Metz], at the Canal Museum, in Easton, has some lantern slides, also. So that's how I got into the Molly Maguire episode. And, as you mentioned, I doubt whether anybody could make a movie at present. I don't know if it would be salable or not, in this day and age. However, it's a fascinating story, the Molly Maguires.

Dublin: It really is. . . . I remember reading an account by Wayne Broehl about the time that I took my orals at Columbia, years ago, so it was a story I was familiar with. Okay, why don't you talk a little bit about some of the other places your work has been exhibited.

Harvan: When I was working at Bethlehem Steel, Ricardo Viera, the curator of prints who also teaches art at Lehigh University, found out about my mine photographs. One day he came up to the lab and looked at some small prints. He immediately remarked that he wanted to have an exhibit. I said, "Well, how many do you want to show?" Well, he said, "I've got four floors." [laughs] I said, "Well, how many prints?" He said, "Oh, I don't know. A hundred, or so. So I agreed to put the show together. I went out and bought the paper and I started printing the mine photographs -- I made them into sixteen by twenties, mounting them on twenty by twenty-four inch boards. The first show I had at Lehigh amounted to 112 prints. A few years later, I had another show, fifty-two 11x14's on 16x20 mounts. Lehigh has about 160 to 170 of my large mine photographs in their permanent collection. I believe I have the largest permanent collection of any photographer in the Lehigh holdings. I was always pleased that they would collect my photographs because Lehigh is going to be around for a long time. People a hundred years, or two hundred years from now could get an idea of what an anthracite miner looked like, how he worked, where they ate their lunch. Close-up portraits of them revealed their inner life. So I was very happy that Ricardo [Viera] would do this for me and the miners.

Dublin: And very appropriate for Lehigh University, which trained a lot of mining engineers over the years.

Harvan: It was strange, but it took a person like Ricardo, who came from Puerto Rico, to really realize the importance of the photos. Most curators, probably would not have bothered, but for some reason, he just latched onto the series.

Dublin: It took an outsider, not an insider.

Harvan: Yes. And maybe somebody who came from a humble background, or something, but whatever it was, he saw something important in the lives of the coal miners. He's been very enthusiastic about the book he just published about a year and a half ago, the catalogue of another show. He's very supportive of my work. Very supportive. I think I've had three exhibits at Lehigh, all told. And the last one was when the catalogue came out.

Dublin: Was that two years ago, now?

Harvan: It'll be two years in October. I think Lehigh did a terrific job printing it. Ricardo insisted it be done in three hundred line duotone; it does the actual prints justice. They come close to the photos; they almost look the same. Because my photographs have a lot of blacks in them. If you're not careful, you could lose detail, so you could lose a lot of the image. In your prints, you want to show detail. If you whiten them up, and print them on the gray side, you then destroy the atmospheric look of the mine. You want to show the wetness, the dirt and the grime. The only way to do it is to print it as black as possible. You can't print gray or semi-gray. But it takes a printer who knows how to use the three hundred line duotone process. You have to know what you're doing. Also, a few years back, Ricardo decided to have a show in the Governor's mansion in Harrisburg. Governor Casey was governor at the time. Lehigh has a great collection of William Rau photographs. William Rau was a photographer for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and then the Lehigh Valley Railroad. He had his own railroad car with a darkroom, engine, and crew. They just pulled him along with his huge sixteen by twenty camera, and he photographed different scenes along the railroad route. There was no good enlarger around at the time, so they would make contact prints of these large negatives, frame them and place them in all the stations along the railroad route. Some of his photographs are classics now. In past years, someone had collected all these Rau photographs and stored them in the basement of the Linderman Library at Lehigh. Ricardo, at the time had a helper. One day the helper, Jerry Bastoni, came across all these William Rau photographs while going through the basement. I think there was about fifty of them. Of course they were elated to find this treasure. They eventually had them re-matted on acid free boards, to preserve them. At this time he decided to show them at the Governor's mansion at Harrisburg. When he took them down, he showed one of my prints which was on a flyer showing the man trip at No. 6 Colliery -- the miners, seated in a coal car, going into the mine. When Mrs. Casey saw it, she said, "I want some of these pictures also." So he had no intention of showing my photos then, but I had to print twenty or twenty-four pictures for an exhibit. So I had a combination show with William Rau in the Governor's mansion. It was there for a couple of months. Through knowing people like Ricardo, you get to see your work shown. Like I said, he's been pretty good to me.

Dublin: What about your relationship over the years with the anthracite museum? Some of your work has been either shown there, or is permanently at Eckley, I think?

Harvan: I have a permanent collection at Ashland. David Salay was head of the three museums [Scranton, Eckley and Ashland] at the time. He came to Lansford and we made a selection of photos which I printed for the exhibit. They're still at Ashland, and they've been up there, goodness, twenty years or more. They should change them. And then I had a big exhibit up at Scranton, which David . . . put together. They put out a nice catalogue, too, called "The Anthracite Miner." That exhibit was borrowed from the Lehigh collection, and then they returned them to Lehigh. Lehigh, at one time, also had a little traveling exhibit, smaller prints -- eleven by fourteen -- which they would send out to different places. They have returned those to me.

Dublin: I know you've done a fair amount of work documenting mine disasters, and that mine disasters have played a role in the history of the anthracite region. Why don't you talk a little bit about your work in relation to those.

Harvan: Well, as everyone is aware, coal mining was a pretty dangerous occupation, especially the early days. You had men going into the mines using oil lamps, and carbide lamps, open flame lamps -- to see what they were doing. There was no other light down there. Through the years, there have been a lot of mine disasters. Huge ones, like the one up at Avondale, I think, in 1869. There was 122 killed there, and the twin shaft disaster at Pittston in 1896 -- twenty or thirty years later, fifty-eight miners were killed. And then the Baltimore Tunnel explosion in 1919, right after the first World War, ninety-four were killed. And through the years, there have been numerous smaller killings -- eight, ten, twelve, Janesville, the floodings, etc. Through the years there have been a number of explosions, fall-ins, fires, that cause deaths. I wouldn't say fortunate, but I was able, in my time . . . to photograph three of these disasters. I guess the first was up at the Knox Coal Co. at Pittston, when twelve men were drowned, when the Susquehanna River broke through. The miners worked a little bit too close to the Susquehanna, when the river broke through. It was in January of 1959. I heard about it on the radio, and it was another one of those situations, I don't know why you do it, but you're part of the region and you feel you must record the event. In '59, it was just about four years after the mines closed here. They were still working up in Wilkes-Barre area. Deep mining was still going on up there. After the river broke through, that was the end of deep mining in the Wyoming Valley. I don't have too many pictures of the initial events because of the time I arrived there. I don't have any pictures of any of the men being brought out. But I do have a few photographs showing the town and the people, waiting to see what's going to happen to the remaining trapped men. I have numerous photos of men dropping in huge railroad gondolas into the river to try to breach the hole in the Susquehanna. That was kind of an eerie scene with the ice flowing down the river, and then the river just swallowing up these huge mine gondolas. And I also photographed the shaft, and the people walking past the shaft, carrying their children. That was the first disaster I covered.

Dublin: That really is such a historic connection, because I know -- I'm pretty sure -- that Harper's, back in the 1860s, would have done drawings at the time of Avondale, and they would have shown the distressed wives of miners, waiting to hear what would happen. I mean, -- you do it in 1959 -- there is a hundred-year tradition in this region of these mine disasters, and of the family members anxiously awaiting what will happen. It is something that goes way back, and is so elemental to the life of a mining town.

Harvan: But there's so few photographs available of these disasters. Every now and then, you'll run across one, somebody will have printed it in the newspaper or magazine. But there were so few photographs or prints made in the anthracite region of the early disasters. I don't know if somebody like -- you mentioned Harper's, would have sent out an artist --whether that was big enough for them, but you would think it would be. Maybe there was other things that they thought were more important. . . .

Dublin: Well, what about Sheppton? That was one where I'd seen some of your photographs, of the Sheppton disaster.

Harvan: The Sheppton disaster was probably the most photographed and watched disaster in the anthracite region. I mean, due to the fact that television was just coming into its own, and the networks were covering it as a big news event. It was covered by each network and local T.V. station in the east. The foreign press was also here.

Dublin: Now this is August '63, right?

Harvan: Yes.

Dublin: How did you hear about this?

Harvan: I also heard about it on the radio. I heard there was three miners entombed at Sheppton. I was working for Bethlehem Steel at the time, and I believe it was a Tuesday. I was off that week, on vacation, when I heard about it, and I decided to see what was going on. Sheppton's not that far from Lansford. You go up 309, to Hazleton, branch off through West Hazleton, and then Sheppton's about three or four miles down the road. When I got there, lo and behold, who do I see but Gordon Smith, who was the chief mine inspector, handling the rescue. I had photographed Gordon many years ago. He was the foreman or Superintendent of the Gilberton Coal Company, at Gilberton. So we became pretty good friends through me making photographs for the company. I took along my 4x5 Speed Graphic. The rescue team was trying to send some miners down the slope, to see how far the cave-in was. They would go down part way, but they'd have to come up because they encountered gas, and falling debris. The mine was pretty well blocked up. I went back up to the mine the next day, and Gordon told me, "I don't think we'll ever find these men alive." I think over the weekend, Joe Bova, who was the brother of Louis Bova, one of the entombed miners, talked to Gordon, and felt that the crew should drill a bore hole at this one particular place, this one area. He had a pretty good idea of what the mine looked like and where they might be. I think it was a Saturday when they decided to drill a six-inch bore hole. After they got down to about three hundred feet, they placed a pipe down into this bore hole. The person -- I forget his name -- hollered down, heard a noise, and got a response. He got all excited and shouted, "They're alive! The men are alive."

Dublin: So the brother of the miner was saying to people, "If I'd been trapped under there, this was a place where I could have gone to."

Harvan: From later accounts, after they did come out, the three of them were together: Bova, Throne, I think Dave Fellin was 58 at the time, Louis Bova was 54, and Henry Throne, who had just worked there a few days, was 28. When they got trapped, the mine hadn't caved in all the way, and Louis Bova thought that he could find an escapeway, so he took off, and that's how he got separated from the other two. After the first six days they were down there, their lights died. Their lamps went dead. They were in complete darkness. They were in a space, maybe six foot long, and maybe about four foot wide. Very narrow place, some timbers had come down, and they were kind of bracing the roof, so nothing else would come down on top of them. They were in a very confined space, and when the word come out that the miners were alive, well, it spread like wildfire.

Dublin: This was about a week after the actual. . .

Harvan: Six days. And this spread from being a local event to a national news story. The first thing you know, the media converged on Sheppton. I called Life Magazine. I knew Ruth Lester, who worked with freelancers and stringers. I told her, "There's a big story breaking here, about the three miners who have been entombed for six days and have been found alive." She advised me to go and cover it. I made photographs until a couple days later when the office sent a Life photographer and a reporter to join me. The Life photographer's name was Gray Vilet, and reporter named Pollock. I forget his first name. We covered it then, continually from then to the day they were brought up. I learned a lot. I was up at the mine site every day. I took all my vacation time plus other days from my job at Bethlehem Steel. After my vacation ran out, I called my boss Orlan, I kept telling him, "I can't make it today. They still haven't got the men out." He was getting a little annoyed, kept asking, "When you coming back?" I said, "Oh, not yet." While covering it for Life, a helicopter would pick up the film, fly it to New York City, and it would be processed there. I never thought too much about it, until one day I felt, "I'm shooting all these pictures, and I'm never going to see them." That was the only thing that I felt bad about it. I think I would have rather not been paid by Life, the hundred and fifty dollars a day, but much rather have had the negatives. They would be more important to me. But about two years after the disaster, I got a big box in the mail. Life sent every negative and every color transparency I shot back to me. So, I have those now.

Dublin: How many did they finally print?

Harvan: I think they just used one of mine. I think they only printed about three or four pictures, but they were noted for that. I mean, if a new story broke and it took precedence, they just cut it. That was the big gripe among the staff photographers. I talked to Gray many times, up at the Hotel Altamont at night, and that was their biggest disappointment with the job. He would go out and shoot stories for weeks and it wouldn't run. They always found more important things to run. But that's the way Life did things. They had so many photographers, all over the world, exposing film, and they only had one magazine to use it in.

Dublin: What are the photos that you remember from that work that you're particularly proud of, or you think captured something that you wanted to communicate to people?

Harvan: Oh, I think most -- the ones I really like are the ones of Mrs. Throne and Fellin, and other members of the family, revealing the anxiety and wondering whether they would see the trapped miners alive again, being consoled by a priest or a sister. These were moving moments. Actually, there wasn't that much more to photograph besides the actual work. The big story was underground, which we had no control over. Also, it was interesting to show all the people who got involved, like the Navy personnel. They got very involved in learning how people can survive underground for fourteen days. They had teams of medical people on the site. They brought in the cameras that they could drop into the opening. After they enlarged the hole, they lowered a camera down in order to view the inside of the chamber. This was all revolutionary in those days. And, of course, the night they were going to bring the men out, it was like a circus up there. I mean, there were so many lights on, it was like a city street. Gray told me, "George, there's no sense in both of us being here. Why don't you go up to the hospital. When they bring the men in, you might get some shots as they wheel them in. So I got in the car, drove up to the gate, and a state cop stopped me and asked, "Where are you going?" I said, "I'm working for Life Magazine, and I want to get into the hospital." He said, "Follow me." Being with Life must have carried an awful lot of weight, because he took me all the way up, past everybody, and placed me right in front of the big network cameras. When they brought the two men down the aisle, on stretchers, I was able to get some good photographs. That was a big event. I doubt whether we'll ever see an event in the anthracite region that will ever be covered like that again. It's not so much that there were so many men killed, it's because they were down so long, and they were found alive and crews were drilling holes bigger and bigger so that eventually they would be big enough to squeeze them out. They used harnesses around them and then lifted them out. They had to figure out which harness worked best -- they tried different devices. I imagine all the survival people learned a lot. They were all over the place. And of course, the union people were there, Tony Boyle among them.

Dublin: Did they ever have an investigation and determine what caused the cave-in?

Harvan: It wasn't an explosion. It was just a fall, probably weak timbers or something like that. . . . It was away from them, but they couldn't get out past the blockage. I think it was right after that when the state demanded that every mine have a second escapeway. I think if they would have had a second escapeway, it would have made a difference.

Dublin: This mine was a tiny operation?

Harvan: Yes, it only employed four people. There was a man who hoisted the cars, a man by the name of Walker, and the other three men, that's all. The tipples were very crude, a small slope, the cars that took the coal out of the mine were very small. It was a small operation, but Fellin was a miner all his life. It was in his blood. Henry Throne believed and even said if it wasn't for Dave, he would have never made it. He pulled him through. If you work in a mine, I don't know how many weeks or just a short time, and all of a sudden you get trapped, and you're twenty-eight years old, it's a totally different situation. . . .

Dublin: Tell me about the Tower City disaster, because that's not one that I really know about. You mentioned it being the last one you covered.

Harvan: Tower City was in March of 1977. It was a day almost like Port Griffith, not quite as cold, but it was in March. That disaster was also caused by a flooding. Evidently some water had built up in the dam in one of the old workings, and then when the men entered the gangway, the water, instead of breaking in from the ceiling, broke in from the bottom and started to flood the mine. I also heard about that on the radio. I found out where Tower City was and decided to go there. I spent a number of days photographing the rescue teams who were hoping to get the men out. They did locate a fellow by the name of Ronald Adley. Evidently, he got up into an air pocket, where the water hadn't reached, and he was able to get enough air to survive. After they did locate him, we were notified. Everyday they would go in with different crews to try to clear enough debris to get him out safely. The press was staying up in a trailer which the state brought in, and that's where we slept. One evening the rescue people said they were going to bring Adley out at nine o'clock the next morning. When you're sleeping in a trailer, you don't get too much rest. So, I got up early and with another fellow, a photographer from The Reading Eagle, headed for the tunnel mouth and after a while, we see a series of lights coming toward us, and they were getting bigger and bigger. Adley had decided he didn't want to be carried out. He wanted to walk out, and when he walked out of the mine, we were able to get photographs of him as he emerged from the tunnel.

Dublin: So the lights you were seeing were the lights of miners who were coming up the slope?

Harvan: It wasn't a slope, it was a drift or tunnel. The rescue workers, yes. So I was able to photograph that event. Before that, all you could photograph was waiting families and the rescue workers. You always tried to get good character studies of their faces and their feelings. That's about all you can show in situations like that.

Dublin: Was there a similar vigil there, as there had been at Sheppton and Port Griffith?

Harvan: Oh yes, but not as big. It was a lot more subdued. Sheppton was unique. The Red Cross was present as always, and also the Salvation Army, and various news people.

Dublin: How many people were trapped at Tower City?

Harvan: I think it was nine, and eight were drowned, but their bodies were found. They never did find Louis Bova.

Dublin: Was that your last major mine disaster in the anthracite region?

Harvan: Yes, there have been some smaller ones, one or two killed by a piece of machinery or a fall of coal or rock. I think that was the last disaster, the sort we'd call a major disaster in the region.

Dublin: With the kind of drama of waiting to see if people would be rescued. 

Harvan: Yeah, you will always have the relatives and the family members doing the waiting and praying. You could just shoot so much of them. You can't start aiming your camera at their faces too often. You've got to give them a little privacy. You have to be very careful of what you're doing. That was the last one I photographed. But one thing I'm proud of, I do have a little record of the three disasters on film. Some aren't great pictures, but they are a record of that time. It's something I treasure.

Dublin: Good. One of the things that's been striking me as we've talked, especially these last two days, is your familiarity with traditions of documentary photography. I'm just curious where you picked that up, and then how you place yourself as a photographer. When did you start getting interested in other photographers and begin to learn about other traditions?

Harvan: I guess just through books and magazines. As I mentioned, I never went to any photo schools, or college. And when you live in Lansford, there's not many people you could really talk to about photography, especially documentary photography. I learned mostly from magazines and a few books. You read about Walker Evans, he was a great photographer, an FSA photographer who did photographs in the Lehigh Valley, and down south before the war. He also did the photos for James Agee's book -- what's the name of the book?

Dublin: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

Harvan: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and when you look at the photographs, you learn. You learn from books and you learn from looking at other photographers' work. As far as any mentors, I never had any. The Museum of Modern Art once had an exhibit by Walker Evans, which impressed me very much. Maybe it was just your background, or what you went through so far in your life, and what you've seen and experienced in the mines and in the service. Maybe it's all documentary in nature, and so you just applied it to your photographs. Maybe there's no reason at all for it, really, just that you apply what you see and what you feel, and you decide to take a picture of the situation. Whether some people say, "This is a documentary photograph," it could be, perhaps not, maybe it's just a slice of life. If that's what constitutes a documentary photograph, well so be it. I don't know how it evolved, probably just moved from one day to the next, one situation, one event, to the next. And for some reason, you are compelled to photograph it. That's about the only reason I can give. I think to be a documentary photographer you, more or less, observe life and observe what's going on about you, constantly. Whether you want to write, photograph it, or paint it. I think you've got to experience life deeply.

Dublin: It sounds like you, in your description of your last months in Japan, that you had a desire to photograph the life around you.

Harvan: That started to evolve -- that's what I said. From then on, I think it was just a gradual progression of different events -- through the years, that you apply this documentary ethic, or whatever you want to call it, to your photographs. I think that's probably the way it started.

Dublin: Do you think your sister Rose was an influence on you, a bit, in this?

Harvan: Not really. I knew she photographed a lot. The only pictures that I saw were the photos in the book she did with John Steinbeck, called The Forgotten Village. I was aware of those photographs, but I also realized that these were done for a film. They were done as a part of a movie set, so they weren't actually documentary pictures. They had the feeling of a documentary movie, but some of the photographs were set up, and I don't think they were true documentary photographs. No, my work was a lot different from photographs that Rose did. But I imagine her being a photographer might have had something to do why I wanted to be one also. I think probably that if she hadn't been a photographer, I might have never pursued it. That's probably the way it happened. I don't know if I had gone to a journalism school, or studied photography with somebody, whether things would have worked out better, or differently, I don't know. It's hard to tell. Rose, when I came out of the service, I guess I was just out a few months, even before I started for the Morning Call, she arranged for me to see a man by the name Ralph Steiner in New York City. He happened to be a great photographer, and a pretty well-known teacher. I never did get to New York to see him. She thought it would have been good for me to look him up. He did a lot of good work. I have seen his work throughout the years, in many magazines.

Dublin: How has photography changed in terms of what you see being done around you, the kind of work that's being done and being published? Harvan: Well, living here in Lansford, I'm not too familiar with other photographers. I've got to know people like Joe Elliott who teaches photography at Muhlenberg College. Joe did a lot of pictures in Bethlehem Steel. He portrayed Bethlehem Steel as a big company, which it was, and all his photographs revealed these majestic monuments -- big blast furnaces and long buildings. Very nice photographs, but he didn't show much of the workers, either. He left out the people in most photographs. He's leaving that up to the viewer to imagine who's working in the plants. You could imagine somebody working by the hot furnaces, but he left out the human element. I heard one fellow who had worked in the steel mills, remarked, "Steel plants were not like that. They were like David [Kuchta] talked about in his book. They were dirty, and hot, and steamy and really miserable places that you couldn't wait to get out of. They weren't monuments. It's just like the recent pictures that I took at the three remaining coal breakers. Joe and I in 1992, photographed the Huber Breaker for the HAER -- the Historical American Engineering Record. At first Joe did the interiors and I did the exteriors, and then we switched around. The Huber Breaker, at Ashley, and the Locust Summit Breaker, near Ashland, and St. Nicholas Breaker, Mahanoy City are the last big breakers left in the anthracite region. There's some small ones still operating, but these were the big ones. They're vacant, and these are almost like the same monuments you would find in closed down steel plants. They're like the headstones -- here lies the remains of a once-great industry. A lot of the machinery is still intact at St. Nicholas. You could imagine, if you closed your eyes, those who worked in St. Nicholas at one time, making the coal marketable. The noise, the water, the grinding of gears and crushers. Now they're silent, just monuments. I believe if you can photograph people in an environment or part of history, I think you should. If the people aren't there anymore, obviously you can't photograph them. But I think photographers can't leave out the people who do the work at the time.

Dublin: You got some photographs at the bagging plant at one of the breakers, didn't you?

Harvan: Yes. That included Joe Lawson at Locust Summit. He's the last remaining worker of the Reading Coal Company in that area. And they had thousands and thousands of people employed there at one time.

Dublin: And he's bagging coal now.

Harvan: Bagging coal, that's all he does. There's a certain stillness about an inside of a big breaker that's hard to explain especially when you're the only person in there walking around. It goes back to the same feeling you get, like, I mentioned in Gettysburg or some other places that I have photographed. You kind of visualize people still in front of you, working or sitting, picking slate, throwing the slate or rock down a chute. I think if you'd inject some of that feeling into your photographs, you put a little bit about yourself into each scene.

Dublin: I think that's an important thing that's obviously, from the very beginning in your work, the connection you've had, what drew you to the mines was the miners, and the experience of the miners.

Harvan: Yeah, I was never really interested in how many cars of coal they put out, or how many feet they had to drill in the vein. I primarily went in a mine there and looked for a certain type of photograph. If I could make that photograph, I was satisfied. Some people around here got really involved in coal mining procedures. They knew all about the mines and other workings. There's people who know a lot more about mines than I do. I'm not talking about miners. I mean ordinary people, because they study books about mining. I was so preoccupied to get a meaningful picture I didn't care what they were actually doing, as long as it was something that was interesting and I could make a photograph. That's all I primarily cared about.

Dublin: That's clearly your approach, and I think that's, in the end, your contribution, especially the shots you took over the years at Lanscoal, when you're in fact capturing miners at work. One will understand the process by how the men did it, and not just as a part of a technology.

Harvan: Yes. And you try to inject a lot of these feelings into photographs, even how they must smell. Sometimes a photograph can reveal a piece of clothing and the odor it must give off. Pretty bad, or something like that. There are many different odors that make up the air in a coal mine.

Dublin: You get close enough to it, and you can see it coming, encrusted and what not.

Harvan: I've had a lot of reviews on my work in the mines in the past. Some writers and people seemed to have gotten that same feeling, too. At the second show I had in the Wilson Gallery at Lehigh University it was during their alumni reunion, affair. An elderly couple from Brooklyn, after viewing my photographs encountered Ricardo [Viera] who put the show together. He told them that the person who took the pictures was present and he pointed me out to them. They came over and told me how much they liked the photographs. They also said, "You know, we were never really a big fan, or never thought much of John L. Lewis, but after looking at these photographs, we feel he might have had a point." The photographs did make people think and show the makeup of a mine, maybe how dirty a mine was, and what the miners had to endure. They also said, "I'm glad I didn't have to do it." So, if that feeling comes across, I guess maybe I've succeeded in a little way.

32m33s

Beyond the Valley

Many of the qualities evident in Harvan's mining photos are also apparent in the photos he took outside the anthracite region. Two interrelated projects—exploring the Pennsylvania Amish and documenting country auctions—occupied Harvan for much of the 1960s, and reveal a basic continuity across the range of his documentary photographs.

A shot of an open buggy with an Amish couple and a young child reflects Harvan's approach to his work. First, there is the image's meticulous composition, something he rarely talks about, but which is evident in his photographs. The horse, buggy, and family dominate in the foreground of the picture, but they fit seamlessly into the larger countryside with its checkerboard fields in the background. The wheels and spokes add other elements to the photograph's geometry. Still, what stands out is the quiet strength on the faces of Harvan's subjects. In the end the Amish family provides the focus of the picture. Using a telephoto lens permitted Harvan to capture the scene without any self-consciousness on the part of his subjects. Harvan's portrait of Brad Smoker, an Amish actor, reveals similar qualities. Harvan captured the intensity and otherworldliness of this “man of the book.” Smoker was no doubt aware of being photographed, yet one senses that there was a relationship here as subject and photographer went about their work; the resulting photograph in no way seems posed.

Harvan seemed to enter the world of his varied subjects almost effortlessly. He did not disturb them, nor call attention to himself as photographer. Several other Amish photographs express these qualities. Consider Harvan's treatment of an Amish woman enjoying ice cream on a day when she had come into town for shopping—or his view of an Amish girl in a closed buggy, probably also on a market day. In both photos the subjects appear engrossed in their own worlds, oblivious of others, including the photographer. This was not accidental, but something that Harvan very consciously strove to achieve. In discussing these photographs, he commented:

“I always photographed the Amish with respect. I never shoved my camera in their faces. They don't particularly like people photographing them. So I either did it with a long lens, which is kind of sneaky in a way, or a hidden camera…I didn't want to invade anyone's privacy just to make a photograph. But you get the feeling that everything about them is unique and the people in their way dignified…When you get into photography seriously, you sometimes feel you should pursue certain subjects. But you've got to do it with a certain amount of respect for the people you decide to photograph.”[17]

These words, of course, apply equally well to Harvan's photographs of Japanese on the streets of Tokyo in 1946, of miners in the Panther Valley in the 1950s, and of the Amish of Lancaster County in the 1960s.

Harvan brought this same sense of respect for his subjects to the photographs he took at country auctions in the late 1950s and 1960s. His signature image from this series is “Farewell, Dear Relics,” the auction picture which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in November 1959. The photo engages the viewer, offering at once a wide view of the auction and a strikingly intimate glimpse of the auctioneer and the audience. All eyes in the scene are turned toward the auctioneer and the captain's chair he holds. Harvan captured the diversity of faces and dress as urban, suburban, and rural met at this country event. The photo reminds one of a Norman Rockwell painting. It was particularly appropriate in a magazine series entitled “The Face of America,” offering a slice of America in the late Eisenhower years.[18]

Harvan's auction photos captured the relationship between audience and auctioneer, both focused on the objects for sale. He emphasized this dynamic by the crowding apparent in many of the shots—particularly evident in “Farewell, Dear Relics,” and in an auction at the Harry Packer mansion in Jim Thorpe. Other images accented this relationship in more subtle ways. In one photograph we see the auctioneer standing at a plow, pointing at and addressing an off-camera bidder. Even audience members who aren't bidding gaze intently at the action. Thus three seated women in one shot and three boys up in a hayloft in another do not miss a beat of what is going on. As he records the rapt attention of the audience, Harvan shows the auction as engrossing entertainment.

This emphasis is striking, given the title of the signature image, “Farewell, Dear Relics,” and the accompanying commentary that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post:

Miss Della Keiser has sold out—lock, stock and barrel—at the rundown family farm near Normal Square, Pennsylvania. Now in her seventies and living in a home for the aged, she's the last survivor of an old and respected clan. So auctioneer Curtis Houser knocked down the time-worn possessions and, so doing, tolled the death of a household and the end of a family.[19]

Even in the “death of a household and the end of a family” there are the living. These “time-worn possessions” take on new life as people bid on them and brought them into their own households.

Equally instructive are the individual portraits Harvan took at these auctions. Harvan captured idiosyncratic personalities, even though he photographed people he did not know. Consider the contrast between two auction attenders: the first a Pennsylvania Dutch farmer, chomping on a cigar and a second farmer, in straw hat and overalls. Like the portraits Harvan took of Lanscoal miners, the personalities of the subjects come through.

Harvan eventually began to express his vision as an artist more explicitly through his photographs, later shifting away from a purely documentary approach to his subjects. In a series of photographs he shot in New York City in the 1960s, Harvan sometimes consciously chose a slow shutter speed, or even rotated his camera, to impart the sense of motion that seemed to him characteristic of urban street life. Contrast an early picture of a woman leaning against a shoestore display window with a later whirling shot of a very similar scene. The first image has the fine focus and clarity common in Harvan's mining photographs; the second is deliberately blurred. Harvan moved from accurately depicting people on New York City streets to trying to capture something of the essence of the scenes he witnessed. He was no longer so focused on telling his subjects' stories—as in the mining photos—as in constructing his own.

This same development is evident in Harvan's photographs of the Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg. Compare Harvan's photograph of a southern general striding firmly into battle with his treatment of a cannon fairly bursting out of another picture. He made no effort in this sequence of photos to tell the story of the famous battle; rather, he photographed the monuments in a way which imparted motion and drama. In a metaphorical sense he brought the battle to life for his audience. As in his earlier documentary work, he sought not just the surface reality, but a deeper truth about people and events. The goals of the New York and Gettysburg series were consistent with that of his mine photographs, but the techniques Harvan used to achieve those ends were very different from the methods he employed earlier in his career.

This evolution is particularly striking in one set of photographs that stands apart from the main thrust of Harvan's photography—his mannequin series. As Harvan commented several times in interviews, he never posed a miner or directed his subjects how or where to stand.[20] In that way, Harvan emphasized the central reality of the scenes he photographed and underscored that he was telling others' stories. The mannequin series provided an interesting departure from his earlier form of expression.

In his oral history, Harvan described how he came upon a mannequin in an abandoned car in a dilapidated shed: “It kind of startled me. The way the light fell on the mannequin, it almost looked like a real person sitting there behind the wheel of this battered car.” Harvan kept coming back to the mannequin in succeeding weeks. As he recalled, “I'd go back, it would either be changed, or it was the same place, or I would move it. It all depended on the lighting and the conditions.” Harvan shot hundreds of photographs over the course of about a year, tracking the seasons and following what happened to the mannequin. Two images capture particularly well the deterioration of the mannequin over time. He wasn't so interested in recording the mannequin for posterity as in telling a larger story through his images: The deterioration of the mannequin was almost like the deterioration of a human being. We go through various stages of our life. We're born, we live, we're young and healthy, we're strong and look good in the spring of our lives. Then we go into the summer of our life, the middle. At a certain point, we start to head downhill, to the fall and the winter of our lives. It reminded me—the deterioration of this mannequin—of our life as we live it. While the deterioration of the mannequin happened in one season, it takes us years.[21]

Like a novelist or playwright, George Harvan consciously crafted a story to speak to the broader human condition. Although he certainly did that in all his work, the nature of his own interventions into the realities of the miners and the mannequin were quite distinct. As a mature photographer in the mid-1980s, approaching the end of his career, he was much more self-consciously the artist crafting his message and less a person recording his own experiences for posterity. He took a more active role in shaping his message than was apparent in his earlier photographic work.

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Among His Peers

One quality strikingly distinguished Harvan from the mainstream of twentieth-century documentary photography. Riis, Hine, Lange, Evans, Rothstein, and others were invariably outsiders in relation to their subjects. They came to their material with specific interests and intentions that became apparent as one analyzes their photographs. In his documentation of the decline of anthracite deep mining in northeastern Pennsylvania, Harvan was quintessentially the insider. There was no self-consciousness as he donned overalls, denim jacket, hardhat, and lamp and hiked a mile into the No. 9 mine to photograph the last days of the Lanscoal miners. He had known those miners and their brothers and sisters since childhood. He came from a local mining family and resided in Lansford all his life, except for a brief period around World War II. His professional work involved photographing miners and members of their families. Thus Harvan stood out in the way he brought an insider's perspective to the documentary tradition.

Several accounts of Depression-era documentary photographers of the Farm Security Administration show this contrast very clearly. Lawrence W. Levine wrote about a famous 1936 photograph Walker Evans took of an Alabama tenant farmer, Floyd Burroughs, published in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The photo shows Burroughs sitting in the doorway of his unpainted cabin, wearing a ripped work shirt with a couple of days of stubble on his cheeks. Evans took other photographs of Burroughs and his family, including a brighter, more optimistic image of Burroughs in his Sunday best surrounded by his wife, sister-in-law, and four clean, nicely dressed children. The published portrait emphasizes the toll the Depression had taken on an Alabama tenant farmer; the unpublished one the pride and dignity of a family facing hardships. Both photographs convey truths about Floyd Burroughs, but it is clear that Walker Evans chose the first one to make a point.[22] So, too, did George Harvan. In selecting photographs for exhibits, Harvan chose images that spoke to the dignity, the strong work ethic, and sense of self-respect he found among his mining neighbors. Though their lives were ones of constant struggle, in Harvan's work, they were not objects of pity.

The difference between Harvan's approach and that of Dorothea Lange is also instructive. Lange's well-known 1936 photograph, “Migrant Mother”, captured 32 year-old Florence Thompson sitting under the shelter of a makeshift tent in a migrant labor camp in California. She has a baby in her lap and two older children leaning on her shoulder, but is facing away from the camera. The caption turns Florence Thompson into something of an ideal type. Levine noted, “Dorothea Lange never inquired after the name of the woman whose image she made immortal . . . never noted the names of the four daughters pictured in the series; never sought to learn the whereabouts of Thompson's other three children or her husband; and, so far as we can tell, never wondered where Florence Thompson had been or where she hoped to go. 'I did not ask her name or history,' Lange noted simply, as if this was the most reasonable possible action.”[23] This was not Harvan's style. Unlike Lange, the resident photographer of the Panther Valley had an intimate knowledge of the life histories of the Lanscoal miners he photographed; he knew their hopes, their expectations, and the reasons they remained in a dying community rather than strike out for brighter economic prospects elsewhere. He understood these men not as sociological types but as individuals. His named portraits of the Lanscoal miners and the detailed captions of his photographs reflect that understanding.

The outsider/insider distinction is one distinction between Harvan and the FSA photographers of the Depression decade, but there is another difference that places Harvan within a broader context. Operating on a national, even an international stage, Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans brought a cosmopolitan perspective to their work. At several junctures in his life—when offered jobs with the Associated Press in Tokyo and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.—George Harvan could have joined that cosmopolitan world. Rather, he returned to the Panther Valley and the anthracite region of northeastern Pennsylvania, and chose a self-conscious provincialism.[24] We say “self-conscious” because he clearly made choices in his life. Moreover, he was not isolated and cut off from larger currents by the choices he made. He published his photographs in respected, national publications; he attended photographic exhibitions in New York City and became increasingly familiar with the best photographic work in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. But he came home to the anthracite region and fulfilled his compelling need to document miners and the last days of anthracite coal mining.

In photographing his miner neighbors, George Harvan brought an insider's view of industrial decline in the region; but when he shot photographs among the Pennsylvania Dutch, or in New York City or Gettysburg, he no longer had this same perspective. Still, he brought attitudes and sensibilities shaped by his formative years as a photographer inside the anthracite mines to these other projects. He sought to minimize his intrusiveness on the subjects of his photos and to treat them with respect, capturing what he viewed as their essential dignity. As noted earlier, he did, over time, experiment in his work, moving away from the total reliance on clarity and sharp focus that characterized his mining photographs. In his Gettysburg and New York City photographs, as well as in the mannequin series, Harvan took liberties that permitted him to craft his own interpretation. In so doing, he drew on expressionistic techniques that were transforming the photographic world. Significantly, Harvan was most willing to experiment when photographing subjects with whom he did not have close personal connections. When he photographed miners, he tried to tell their story; in New York City, photographing anonymous figures on the street, or at Gettysburg, photographing bronze statues of distant war heroes, he took more liberties in telling his story.

George Harvan's self-conscious provincialism distinguishes him from the FSA photographers and other nationally prominent documentary photographers, but his local, working-class focus has much in common with other photographers in the years since World War II. The works of three photographers offer quite different perspectives from which to consider Harvan's place within contemporary documentary photography: the Cape Breton mining photographs of Leslie Shedden; the Appalachian mining photos of Earl Dotter, and the photos taken by Bill Bamberger during the closing of White's Furniture Company in Mebane, North Carolina.

Leslie Shedden was a commercial photographer located in Glace Bay, Cape Breton. He was employed by the Dominion Steel and Coal Corporation (Dosco) to take publicity photographs of their mining operations. A rich collection of images from the Shedden Studio archives appeared in 1983, accompanied by critical and historical essays exploring Shedden's industrial and commercial photographs taken between 1948 and 1968.[25] Given Harvan's photographic work in the mines of the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company (1949-1954) and the Lanscoal Company (1960-1972), these two bodies of work offer striking opportunities for comparison.

Machinery dominated Leslie Shedden's photographs of Dosco's underground mining operations in Cape Breton. As Shedden himself explained, “We didn't go down in the mines to take pictures of workmen, we went down to take pictures of machinery, of equipment.”[26] Operations at Dosco differed from those at LC&N because the veins of bituminous coal ran horizontally in Cape Breton and were susceptible to mechanization, while hand operations continued to predominate in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania. Continuous mining machines and automatic conveyor belts played major roles in bituminous operations, but were conspicuously absent in anthracite mining. Equally important, Dosco manufactured and sold mining machinery and many of Shedden's pictures were used in company advertising.

Even with these differences in the work processes that characterized the two mining operations, similarities linked Harvan's early photographs to those of Shedden. Allan Sekula's description of Shedden's photographs can be applied with little revision to Harvan's commissioned work for LC&N: “Here are clean, well-lit tableaux. There are two kinds of stasis…First, there is the overt stasis of the 'pose,' of a group of managers or miners standing self-consciously in front of the camera…Second, there is a duplicitous sort of stasis, a stasis which poses as movement. A machine is shown 'in action ', cutting into the coal face. But if this were true the camera would have registered a black fog of coal dust.” [27] These lines bring to mind Harvan's image of well-scrubbed coal salesmen, grouped in front of the No. 8 mine in Coaldale.

How different are Harvan's images of miners at work at LC&N and at the Lanscoal Company! Particularly in the latter operation, he documented underground miners for posterity, not for a company's advertising or public relations needs. At Lanscoal, Harvan focused on the camaraderie among the miners…drinking beer and singing at the end of the week's work…not something that either Dosco or LC&N was likely to permit on company property. What we see in Shedden's work is what Harvan's work might have looked like had LC&N continued in operation throughout his career as a photographer. The company's closing freed Harvan to approach his subjects in new ways and to develop new relationships with them. LC&N paid Harvan well, but his photos had to meet corporate needs. His interview comments reveal that he always took more photos than were called for on a given job and no doubt he often framed shots with his own needs in mind. Still, as a free-lance photographer in the employ of the Panther Valley's sole anthracite firm, he necessarily operated under constraints. These considerations changed dramatically when the company closed its mining operations in 1954. The ultimate result was a body of photographic work very distinct from that produced by Leslie Shedden in Cape Breton.

Comparing the photographs of Shedden and Harvan emphasizes the significant differences in the stories they constructed. Another photographer of miners, Earl Dotter, comes to mind as a contemporary who shared Harvan's perspectives and impulses. Dotter had more formal training and traveled more widely, but in the 1970s he focused his photographic work on coal miners in Appalachia. (For more on Dotter's biography and his photographic projects, go to his site). Like Harvan, Dotter was drawn to the hard, dangerous work underground, and to the strength and courage of miners and their families in the face of hard work and adversity. Two images stand out when comparing the similar approaches of these two documentary photographers. Examine for a moment Dotter's portrait of a bituminous miner from Logan, West Virginia with one of family members of miners following industrial accidents have much in common. We see in these images enormous respect for people facing tragic losses.

Dotter's work has been well described by Walter Rosenblum, in an introduction to the portfolio In Mine and Mill. Rosenblum wrote, “his images contrast the danger and discomfort of mining with the dignity and heroism of the miners themselves.” His description of Dotter at the funeral of one of the victims of the Scotia Mine disaster in 1976 could have applied to Harvan during the tense vigils after the disasters at Port Griffith and Sheppton some years earlier: “[His] presence at the moment of tragedy is remarkably unobtrusive, as though he wears a cloak of invisibility. But this is not accidental. He has paid his dues in the five years of working and living with miners who regarded him as a member of their families.”[28] Dotter and Harvan came to their photography from different backgrounds, but they were cut from the same cloth in the way they operated, and in the way they related to miners. Both show us, in Rosenblum's words, the “heroism and simple dignity” of men and women who led hard lives in mining communities.

This perspective is shared by Bill Bamberger, whose photographs in Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory portray furniture workers caught in the throes of deindustrialization as the North Carolina factory where they had worked for ten or twenty years closed down. Bamberger had to win the workers' trust, but over a five-month period the firm's employees accepted the photographer and opened up to him. Bamberger caught his subjects at work, relaxing during breaks, learning of the plant closing, and reading or signing their pension forms. As in George Harvan's photographs, Bamberger offers many engaging views of the work process, but his focus is on the workers, rather than on the machinery or the final products. He too is drawn to portraits that express the dignity and self-respect of men and women caught in circumstances over which they exercise no control. As in Harvan's work, broad economic and social changes take on a human face in Bamberger's photographs.

Dotter, Bamberger, and Harvan all build on traditions of realistic portraiture developed by the FSA photographers, but they empathize and identify with their subjects rather than sympathize for them. Their work communicates respect rather than pity.

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In the end, George Harvan is significant because he crafted an enduring photographic record of the last years of underground anthracite mining in northeastern Pennsylvania—and of the region's mining families as they experienced that decline. He knew the region and its people intimately for eighty years. He came of age in Lansford during the Depression, joined his classmates in the work camps of the Civilian Conservation Corps, and with them found his way into military service during World War II. Unlike his neighbors, though, he returned home after the war with a camera in hand, a keen visual eye, and a determination to record life around him as he found it. For half a century he has been in a unique position to record life in this corner of Pennsylvania and to graphically preserve for posterity the industrial decline of the Panther Valley: the anxiety and heartaches of mine disasters, the abandoned and decaying coal breakers, but also the great love of life, pride, and self-respect of hardworking men and women who chose to stay on and make their way in the face of traumatic economic decline. In bringing these people and their lives out of the shadows, George Harvan has done a great service. Their story is his story and we are all the richer for his having shared it with us.

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• 17. Interview 3.
• 18. George Harvan produced two other photographs for "The Face of America" series, but we have not included them in this edition because no usable negatives or original prints survive. They remain fascinating views in their published form. See "The End of Freedom," Saturday Evening Post, March 19, 1960, pp. 40-41 and "Nuns' Day Off," Saturday Evening Post, October 1, 1960, pp. 34-35.
• 19. "Farewell, Dear Relics," Saturday Evening Post, November 14, 1959, p. 34.
• 20. Interview 5. Harvan expressed this aspect of his approach explicitly: "When I go into a mine, for instance, I will never tell a miner to do something because it's going to look better, or `Look this way, you're going to look better.' I would rather take him the way he is and what he is doing and let the chips fall where they may. If it's a good photograph, fine. If it's not, at least it's real..."
• 21. Interview 3.
• 22. Lawrence W. Levine, "Photography and the History of the American People in the 1930s and 1940s," in Fleischhauer and Brannan, eds., Documenting America, 1935-1943, pp. 21-22. For Evans's thoughts about his approach to documentary photography, see Leslie Katz, "An Interview with Walker Evans," in Vicki Goldberg, ed., Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), pp. 358-69. For a useful introduction to Evans and his work, see "Walker Evans Revolutionizes Documentary Photography.
• 23. Levine, "Photography," pp. 25-26.
• 24. Our thanks to photographer Fred Lonidier for comments that helped crystallize the distinction we are offering here.
• 25. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh and Robert Wilkie, eds., Mining Photographs and Other Pictures, 1948-1968: A Selection from the Negative Archives of Shedden Studio, Glace Bay, Cape Breton, photographs by Leslie Shedden; essays by Don Macgillivray and Allan Sekula; introduction by Robert Wilkie (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and the University College of Cape Breton Press, 1983).
• 26. Allan Sekula, "Photography Between Labour and Capital," in Buchloh and Wilkie, eds., Mining Photographs and Other Pictures, p. 257.
• 27. Sekula, "Photography Between Labour and Capital," p. 257.
• 28. Dotter, In Mine and Mill. Photos used here with permission of Earl Dotter

Thomas Dublin

George Harvan

"I think the greatest accomplishment . . . I could think of is that I was able to stay with photography for practically my whole adult life."

Dublin: Another project, one that I've been aware of you working on in the years that I've known you, has been this Polaroid photography project, where you've moved into another medium that you hadn't used that much earlier in your photographic career. You want to describe a little bit, what you've done with that, and what that's given you as another way to express yourself in your work?

Harvan: As you know, I've done very little work in color during my career in photography. I concentrated mostly on black and white. I did that because I was able to control all of the facets of it. I regularly got the film that I wanted, I could process the negatives, make the prints, and I could manipulate the prints any way I wanted to. Also, if I wanted to make them darker or lighter, or bring out certain highlights, I was able to do it. For that reason, I concentrated on the black and white. I stayed away from color because I felt I always had a lot more to say making black and white photos. Even to this day, I feel there are avenues that I could still pursue in working within black and white. A number of years ago, a friend, Henry Jones, from Bethlehem, gave me this SX-70 camera, a Polaroid camera that kind of spits out exposed film from out front. It takes a 2½ x 2½ picture. The film is called Time Zero and it has a plastic coating on the front and back. The emulsion is trapped between these two coatings. I read at one time that you can move this emulsion around with a sharpened stick or some other pointed object, and as long as you didn't rip the plastic, you can move it around, and change the image. I was able to secure some outdated film and I started to manipulate the emulsion. I thought it had possibilities and in time, I was able to purchase good film. Through manipulating this emulsion, I have transformed a realistic image almost to an impressionistic type of a painting-type of a photograph. Most people think that I have copied paintings when I show them around. I have to convince them that these are not copies of paintings, but actual photographs. I explain how I manipulate the soft fluid emulsion. Sometimes I will start the process, right after I make the exposure. Other times, I'll wait maybe a half a day or a day. That way, I get different effects. When I accumulated a few, I sent them to Bill Johnson, who is the editor of Camera Techniques. In a few days, he replied in a letter that he likes them very much and would like to use them. When they will be published, I have no idea, but they are in the works.

Dublin: Are you continuing to do a little more traveling and shooting in that medium?

Harvan: Yes. They work very well with buildings, certain types of buildings. I had traveled to different areas of the state when I was able. Places like the Hopewell Village, near Boyertown. And the Daniel Boone Homestead, and Jim Thorpe, with its mansions, or the old buildings in Wilkes-Barre. These are just a few of the places that I have photographed. At the outset I thought I could move around the eastern part of Pennsylvania and put images of these places on polaroid film. I knew they would be kind of unique. Eventually, I'll donate them to the Canal Museum, in Easton.

Dublin: That's an additional chapter in your work.

Harvan: It's kind of a fun thing, because you don't need a darkroom, just a few sharpened sticks. You take the picture, sit down, look at it and determine how you want to work on it. You can obliterate and use your imagination. Maybe there's a telephone pole or some power lines in the photo when you took it, something you had no control of. But now you could block them out. By moving the emulsion around, you could more or less take out objectionable objects. It does give you some freedom and a little more control. Almost like a painter has. He starts with a blank canvas and puts down whatever he wants to. Sometimes in photography, when we're taking a certain subject, you'll notice something that should not be there, but there's nothing you could do about it. You've got to include it, either that, or try to come in a bit closer, but at times this is not possible. But with this process, you could take out a lot of these objects that you don't feel should be in the picture. But the best part is that you change the photographic image to make a more painterly rendition.

Dublin: Do you ever feel like you'd like to work with a program like Adobe Photoshop or printshop, because it sounds like, that in the computer, digitized world, one can also manipulate a photo in a way that the old darkroom techniques don't allow.

Harvan: No, but I'm sure you can do that with Photoshop. It's a little late, I think, for me to get into that. There's still a lot I want to do with black and white in the conventional way. There's a lot I can learn in the medium. But I agree, if I was just starting out or had more time, I would definitely get into it. I don't approve of what some are doing with the digitized images. I don't think putting a man's head on a horse is the way to go. But I realize that there are uses for the modern technology and the digital way of doing things.

Dublin: It's one thing as art. It's interesting that the contradictions that it entails as a documentary record, because people can actually manipulate and doctor the records to make it appear as if a person was at a scene and a location when he wasn't. Or to take the person out. I mean, as the Russians used to take out political leaders when they went into disfavor at a certain point. So as a photographer can do something like that, which is problematic.

Harvan: In documentary photography though, you have to be very careful of what you take out. A photograph might include a row of buildings, with service poles, and wires connected to them. Someone might decide, "The picture's going to look a lot better if the poles and the lines were taken out. It's going to look nicer, cleaner." But, it's not going to tell the truth because not only is the building historic, but the poles that hold the wires are part of the actual scene. If taken out, it would falsify the record. I feel they should be left in.

Dublin: It's very confusing to the historian who wants to date a photo. All of the sudden, suppose you know that telephone poles were put in at a certain date. So you say this has to be before, let's say, 1895. On the other hand, it may be that some of the buildings on the street were only built after 1895, and yet, the buildings seem to be there, but the telephone poles don't. So, all of the sudden, it becomes a little too much a work of art and not enough a work of documentary photography. That, then, throws people off.

Harvan: That's why I said you have to be very careful with this new technology, that we don't go too far with it as far as changing the actual scene. I could understand where a rare photograph is torn or there's a big mark on it, someone should decide whether it is proper to take the mark out and restore it to its original form. In a way, you are altering that particular photograph, but maybe it would reveal more if it were restored, especially if the defect was occurring on a person's face or of that nature. I have noticed a lot of photographs of President Lincoln that good museums will not touch. If dirt marks or other blemishes are on the print they just let them on, they don't retouch. They just show them the way they are, and they have a point.

Dublin: This leads in very nicely, for some final reflections on your part, about what you tried to do in your career as a photographer. Maybe a little bit also how photography has changed in the years that you've been doing it. Do you have thoughts you want to reflect on? We've been doing your career in chunks, each of the interviews. But now maybe a bit a of an overview of your own.

Harvan: Well, I think the greatest accomplishment that I think I could think of is that I was able to stay with photography for practically my whole adult life. A lot of people get into certain things, and after a few years they try something else. They branch into other fields. For some reason, I was able to stay into photography and a certain type of photography. I'm really not a maker of photographs, I'm more or less of a taker of photographs. I have to see a certain type of situation, and be part of it. When I go into a mine, for instance, I will never tell a miner to do something because it's going to look better, or "Look this way, you're going to look better." I would rather take him the way he is and what he is doing and let the chips fall where they may. If it's a good photograph, fine. If it's not, at least it's real. So that's why I think I'm a taker of photographs. Many photographers set up different situations, and they're good at it. They can manipulate lighting, manipulate subjects, and come out with very good results. I can't do that. I have to work the other way. I think that's what I've been able to do through the years. I do still-lifes every now and then, I might set up some objects, mostly as an exercise in creativity. But for my documentary photography, I would never alter it in any way. As for the remaining years I have, I would just like to continue taking pictures as long as I can. I'm working on circular prints now. I make these with a simple 4x5 box, outfitted with a 47 millimeter lens, which is a very extreme wide angle for a 4x5. It's equivalent to maybe about a 16 or 17 millimeter, on a 35 millimeter, which is fairly wide. What I'm doing is using all of the exposed area on the negative. I had done some work with the 8x10 circular prints, in the past, but for the last four or five months I've switched to the 4x5 and I've come up with a whole series of circular negatives. I haven't printed them so far. At the present time, that's the project I'm working on. I'm seeing things a lot differently, working up close on a tripod, shooting everything at a second, a half second, at f-32, getting extreme depth of field. I'm photographing subjects like -- on Saturday, when they were through shoveling the coal out of the mine car, onto a pile at the No. 9 museum. A shovel had been placed right in the middle of the coal pile. I thought it would make a good picture. Things like that, taking ordinary things and making a photograph of it. Nothing spectacular -- I'm not looking for the large or spectacular subject. Shovels, roots of trees, stumps in water, driftwood, things like that. I'll see how they print up.

Dublin: What do you do if you're using a 4x5 negative holder and negative, what do you do to block it so the light only hits the negative in a circular portion of that negative?

Harvan: All lenses give you a circular image. Camera manufacturers alter the above. They cut off a certain amount of the image, to suit their format. All images are round since the lens is circular. What designers do is if they want a square image, you have a square format, or they give you an oblong format, but in all cases you are missing part of the image from the top and bottom and from the sides. However, I am using the entire image just as the lens sees it. Nothing's cut off. Almost all the image, there's very little I'm missing with the round image. I think just that alone gives you kind of like a peephole effect. It's something that might attract your attention a little more than if I used a 47 millimeter that covered the entire 4x5 format. This is what the circular image is all about. I also am going to start printing my pinhole negatives, which I have been making for the last year or so. This is a very unique way of making photographs. I have collected about fifty negatives up to now, which I'll start to print whenever I can. I'd like to mount them eventually and have an exhibit of these unusual photographs.

Dublin: And this is through a pinhole camera that you've made?

Harvan: Yes, I have about six or seven different pinhole cameras, of various formats that I use. Some use photo paper as a negative base. These run up to 13" wide, 10"x13". Then I'll contact this paper negative onto a piece of paper. I'll expose right through the back of the negative onto a piece of sensitized paper. When you're in photography for a long period of time, you strive at times to get away from what you've already done. You don't want to duplicate what you've been able to do in the past. I have much better cameras now than I ever had. I have cameras I never dreamed I would own. Automatic Nikons, I have a 645 Pentax, with three lenses that 20, 30 years ago I would have given my eye teeth for. But, basically, they all give you the same type of picture that I was doing 20, 30 years ago. It's just your imagination that changes things. And sometimes, the instrument you use, like the pinhole or other cameras that I have made, that will change the way you see things. There are subjects that I take now using the circular image that don't work. Then you have to look for a subject that will work. I might go out for two or three hours and come back with two or three pictures only, but they will all be different, I never duplicate. I take one exposure and that's it.

Dublin: You think about a street scene. And it's extremely rectangular. The way we visualize and the way a city block is constructed, that might, for instance, not fit so well into a circular format. You would sort of lose some of the defining characteristics of that image.

Harvan: Yes, you must find a subject that fits your conception of what you are trying to say. You do look across a street, a long street. It's got that horizontal look. And you look at a building, a skyscraper, a vertical look. You can't put a subject like that into a circular image, no. But, a subject like…let's see, what did I just photograph? I was up at the G. A. R. Cemetery, in Summit Hill and I noticed that some flags had blown off their supports and were just lying on the grass. It was wet and they just lay crumbled. It seemed awfully ironic that these flags, at one time, on May the 30th, were flying proudly over some veteran's grave, and now in the fall, with the rain and other elements, they were discarded more or less. As I walked around I saw numerous flags in the grass in the same condition. I thought these would make an interesting statement about discarding certain values that we shouldn't be. And for this it worked out great. I was able to work maybe 2, 2½ feet from the flags, real close to the ground, and make the exposure. But I have got extreme depth of field, with the small aperture, if something was in the background, say 30 feet, I was also able to keep that sharp. Yes, it works for certain subjects, you're right. Square subjects should have a square format. And there are subjects that only take with the pinhole camera. You can't expose into the sun because the direct light goes into the pinhole and causes an excess amount of fog, so you have to wait for a cloudy day or have the sun to your back. You learn after a while what will work. Mating a particular type of camera to a certain subject is what it's all about. It's always been that way.

Dublin: So, you end up seeing things differently, disciplining your work differently. There's no one picture that's a better picture than another. They serve different purposes or do different things. And you capture them in different ways.

Harvan: After a while, you want to go into different areas of photography, exploit other areas, where you have a better way of expressing yourself, or perhaps as you get older and you look at life a little differently and look beyond the obvious -- also try to get a little more of your feelings beneath the surface image. To make an image that is sharp and clear sometimes doesn't work. A soft image made with a pinhole, in which the depth of field is uniform but nothing is really sharp, can express your purpose a lot more. A subject can be 2 inches away, but all the surrounding area will still have the same degree of sharpness, but it will not be needle sharp, not like the image a good lens would give you.

Dublin: It's a little bit like, I see parallels in being a historian. At some point, seven, eight years ago, I made a decision to begin a major project on the anthracite region and on the twentieth century. I'd never done that before. I was much more prepared at that point in time to write yet another book about the nineteenth century in New England, and yet, it wasn't calling on all the range of skills or ways of doing history that I wanted to do. By doing the coal mines, 1) I learn a lot about the coal mines, 2) I have to learn about oral history; it's something I couldn't do for the nineteenth century. There's no one around anymore who could talk about it. So, it forces me to grow. And you're talking about growth and change and ways of expressing yourself that have the same integrity and the same richness as other things. But, for a while, you won't be as good at. But, the outcome will be that you will learn in the process.

Harvan: I think that's what it's all about. You're constantly striving to learn more and by using other instruments, it changes the way you think about different subjects. You can't take action shots, for instance, with a pinhole camera, because you're not going to get a satisfactory picture. So you have to choose a static subject, and you have to transform that static event into something that people look at and appreciate -- an image they could never visualize. If you can succeed to put that image onto a piece of paper and can look at it and wonder how that was made or what it is, then maybe you have accomplished something. I like to take an ordinary subject and transform it into something entirely different. Perhaps a new way of seeing a railroad engine or a railroad car. The pinhole image lets you do that in a kind of abstract way.

Dublin: There's an element of seeing things differently.

Harvan: Mysterious, in a way. I think that's what it is. A certain amount of mystery creeps into the image and that is what you try to show, something that you can't do conventionally. If you're working commercially, with a certain client, you can't do this. They would want to show their machinery to their best advantage, nice and clean and sharp. Then that's what you have to give them, but fortunately I don't have to do that (laughs).

Dublin: So you can express your understanding, or your vision of it, not someone else's vision.

Harvan: If I want to go overboard and let my imagination go, I can; it is all up to me. Documentary photography has to be made realistically. You just let your eye guide you to what you want to record. Not only your eye, but your own heart, how you feel about the subject. I think you have to understand your subject no matter what you photograph in order to make a successful image. I had to know the coal miners, for instance, not only when I was taking their pictures, but also when I listened to them, when they talked or kidded around with each other, constantly learning and taking it all in. I had to be part of them before I could photograph them properly.

Dublin: What you're expressing is not just what you see at that moment, but you're expressing all that you know about the world they are a part of, and their lives that lead up to that point when you document it.

Harvan: There was a lot of times when I wouldn't have the camera, and they'd be talking, and I would say to myself, "That's something I should be photographing now." But, you can't constantly keep using your camera. You've got to stop every now and then and sit back and just listen and observe. And then, put it in your memory bank, and perhaps exploit this memory later on should it come back to you and you could use it for vital elements of a photograph. It is like the memory you store when you take a picture inside of a coal mine. It's dark and cold, a couple of miners working at the breast, perhaps drilling. This is the image you make on the negative. Then you process the negative and print it; your memory that will tell you how the print should look, how it should be printed. This is how you saw it, and this is the way the print should look. That's why I believe a photographer should actually do his own printing. I can't visualize or imagine another person doing my printing. There is a lot of big name photographers, some like Cartier-Bresson, who never printed his own photographs. He always had someone make his prints and he's one of the most famous photographers in the world. It works for him but I couldn't do that. I could never give a printer enough information to print one of my negatives made inside a coal mine and have it look like the actual scene as I saw it, print the way I actually visualized and felt when I pressed the shutter.

Dublin: So your work as a photographer is not done when you snap the shot.

Harvan: Yes, and it's what you retain in your mind when you were taking the picture. There are certain aspects that you will think about when you are printing. You remember to inject a feeling on paper because this is the way it looked and felt to you. For instance, you take a picture on a foggy day; you could manipulate it so that it can almost look like it was made on a bright day. But, you don't want to do that. If it's a foggy day, that's the way you remember it and you want to print it as such, soft, with all the ingredients of fog and mist.

Dublin: There's obviously this wonderful fit between the choice you made coming back from the service in 1947 and the world that that's opened up to you and the way that you can continue now a little bit more than 50 years later to reflect on what that has made possible for you, and the growth and the continuing change. You probably wouldn't have imagined when you came back that you would have been able to do this life, this way. 

Harvan: Oh goodness, no. It's a continuing process, it's still going on. I'm going to be 77 pretty soon and I hope I can do it for quite a bit longer. But I don't want to repeat on what I have done. I don't like to keep printing coal mining pictures, but people keep asking for them, so I have to reprint them every now and then. But I do go into different types of photography. That's why I went into manipulating the polaroids. It was so different from anything I have done in the past. I remember when I wrote a letter back to Bill Johnston, editor of Camera Technique, and I said, "That's what's great about photography." On one hand I am able to make stark black and white photographs of coal miners, but also, I could make pictures in color on polaroid film of a beautiful tree in the fall, a building, or a bowl of fruit. And that is what makes photography so interesting. It is one of the most important means of expression we've had. Photography has allowed us to see how people looked during the Civil War, more so than a painting would reveal. And it's fairly new, 150 years old, not very old, really.

Dublin: It's really changing so much, or it has so much potential for change in all this.

Harvan: Sure. We say it's one hundred fifty years old. I've been in it for 50, one-third of the time it has been in existence. That gives you an idea of how new it is.

Dublin: So you're a part of that art form.

Harvan: Yes, and I've learned it all myself and I think that has a lot to do with it, too, that I was able to do all by myself. I never worked with anybody and whatever I have accomplished, it has been through my own efforts. I imagine a lot of what talent you have is given to you. Everyone is given an amount. I guess some more than others. There are other people who have perhaps almost the same make up I have, maybe they are just missing one little ingredient, maybe the vision is not as intense, or the desire. I'm nothing special or unique. I'm just fortunate that I was able to do a particular thing for a long period of time and enjoyed it.

12m18s

Thomas Dublin

George Harvan

I'm really not a maker of photographs, I'm more or less of a taker of photographs. I have to see a certain type of situation. I'd go into a mine, for instance, I will never tell a miner, "Well do this because it's going to look better," or "Look this way, because you're going to look better." I would rather take him the way he is and let the chips fall where they may. If it's a good photograph, fine. If it's not, that's why I think I'm, like I said, I'm almost a taker of photographs, instead of maker.

0m37s

Thomas Dublin

George Harvan

Well, there's a certain way you see pictures that no one else can see pictures. If you write a story or something, you could only write it. No one else can. I know, I mean, I don't like to be boastful, I know there's a lot of pictures that I see that people don't see because, first of all, you train yourself and it's just the way you feel about things. The pictures down in Gettysburg, and that mannequin -- who would have thought about following a mannequin around for a whole year, in all kind of weather, and going up in the snow, and stooping in the snow photographing a mannequin laying in the snow, with a reed across the face or something like that. Yeah, if I wouldn't have done it, they wouldn't exist. They exist now, but it's not an earth-shaking thing, but it's something that I did. That's about the whole size of it. Nothing's really that important to each individual, I don't think.

1m12s

Thomas Dublin

George Harvan

I was up at the G.A.R. Cemetery, up at Summit Hill and there were some flags that had blown off the grave and they were just laying on the grass, and it was wet and they were crumpled. It seemed awfully ironic that these flags, at one time, say May the 30th, they were flying over someone's stone, someone's grave, and now in the fall, with the rain, they're just laying in the grass, discarded more or less. And I walked around and I saw numerous flags in the grass, discarded. I thought these would make a kind of a statement that maybe we're discarding certain things that we shouldn't be. And this worked out great. I was able to work maybe 2, 2 _ feet from the flags, real close to the ground, and shoot these flags. But in the meantime, I have such extreme depth of field, if something was in the background, say 30 feet, I was able to get that completely sharp also, and it kind of worked. It kind of worked for certain subjects, you're right. Certain things are square, boxes are square. So you make a square format. Persons, a vertical person, he's walking, he's up and down, so you do� And there's certain subjects you only take with the pinhole too. You don't take anything into the sun because the sun goes into the pinhole and just fogs everything, so you have to take things on a cloudy day or with the sun at your back. You learn after a while, what to take and what to use that particular type of camera for, a certain subject is what it's all about. It's always been that way, really

2m1s

Thomas Dublin

George Harvan

A friend of mine gave me an SX-70, the friend was Henry Jones, from Bethlehem. One day, he gave me this SX-70 camera, it's a Polaroid camera that kind of spits out a film from the front. It takes about a 2 _ x 2 _ picture. The film is called Time Zero film and it has a plastic coating on the front and back. The emulsion is trapped between the front and the back. I read somewhere that you can move this emulsion around with a sharpened stick or some pointed object, as long as it didn't rip the plastic, and you can move it around. I was able to secure some out-dated film and I started to manipulate this and move it around. I thought it had possibilities and later on, I was able to purchase a good film. Through manipulating this emulsion, I have transformed a realistic image almost to an impressionistic type of a painting-type of a photograph. Most people think that I have copied old photographs when I show them to them and I said, "No, these aren't copies of paintings, these are actual photographs," and I explain how I manipulate. Sometimes I will start moving the emulsion around, right after the exposure. Other times, I'll wait maybe a half a day or a day and I get different effects each day. I send them to Bill Johnson, who is the editor of Camera Techniques.

2m7s

Thomas Dublin

George Harvan

Joe [Elliott] and I did . . . in 1992, we did the Huber Breaker for the Park Service. Joe did the interiors and I did the exteriors of the Huber Breaker, and then we switched around. And the Huber Breaker, and the Locust Summit Breaker, and the St. Nicholas Breaker are about the last three breakers left in the anthracite region. Big breakers, you know, there's some small ones still operating, but these are the big ones. They're vacant, and these are almost like the same monuments of the steel. They're almost like the headstones -- here lies the death of a great industry, of once-great industry. And they have all the machinery still, like up at St. Nicholas, and you could imagine the people that worked in St. Nicholas at one time, putting out all this coal, the noise, the water, the hustle and bustle. And now they're just silent, they're just monuments.

1m17s

Thomas Dublin

George Harvan

One weekend, I was walking up near the east end of Lansford, up near the railroad station, between Lansford and Nesquehoning, near the old stripping area, Fazios had a stripping area. And they had a large shed there, looked like a large garage. I used to pass it every now and then, wonder what was in it. One Saturday I just happened to open the door and I saw this beat up old car in there, and in the front seat was a mannequin - a woman mannequin. It startled me. I thought, with the way the light, back-lit, it almost looked like a real person, sitting there in the behind of this battered up car. So I opened the door and took some pictures of this mannequin sitting in the front seat of this car. I came home and developed them and I thought they were all right... The next week I went back up and the mannequin's gone. And I thought, "Oh, goodness, here I want to take some more pictures, and the thing's gone." So I get out, and roam around the area, and there I find the mannequin laying in the grass somewhere, and someone had put a hole right through the mannequin's head, a bullet hole through, I guess, they were using it for target practice. So I took some pictures there. And this happened every few weeks, I'd go back, it would either be changed, or it was in the same place, maybe I would move it. It all depends on the lighting and the conditions...Well, this was the summer, and it just so happened that it went from the summer to the fall, and the rain started to fall on it, and then the plaster started to come off a little bit, and it started to crack. And I photographed it from the fall into the winter. The snow was on it, and the weeds would fall on top of it, and wherever it fell, I would photograph it. Of course, in all this time, it was deteriorating more and more, pieces were falling off here...And then it went-when it would rain, you could almost see the tears coming down the face, the water flowing down the face, and then after the winter with the cold and all that, it had deteriorated a lot more, and it started to really crack. And then it went up into the spring, and by that time, it was starting to become less of a mannequin, just a shell of what it was. And then the following summer, someone had thrown it on the road, and I guess a car ran over it, and it almost like flattened it out. But that final picture, when it was laying in this puddle of water, it almost looked like the thing was rising, like it was rising in the air. What happened was the reflection of the sky in the water-it almost felt like the mannequin was rising...And after I made all these pictures, you know I made hundreds of them in the course of the year, the deterioration of the mannequin was almost like the deterioration of a human being. We go through various stages of our life. We're born, we live, we're young, we're young and healthy, we're strong and look good-and then we go into our middle stage, the summer of our life, the middle. And then we get to a certain point, we start to go down, the fall and the winter of our lives. And it kind of reminded me in fact - the deterioration of this mannequin, of our lives. While the mannequin did it in one season, it will take us years to do it.

Thomas Dublin

George Harvan

Another project that I worked on for a long time was the Civil War battlefields, like Gettysburg and Antietam and Charlottesville. I had a Volkswagen camper and I used to just take off for two or three days, four days, and sleep in there. I got very involved with the Civil War battlefields, and I would get up early in the morning when no tourists were out in the fields. That was another time you would actually feel the battle. If you knew a little bit about how the battles were fought, you could actually hear the guns, you could hear the cries, and you could hear the horses. But that's how you did it. Taking pictures, you have to get involved emotionally, other than that they're just shells. They're nothing really. You have to get involved with it, fully involved, totally involved. In fact, there would be days when I couldn't get any pictures and I'd feel bad, I would actually feel bad. If I would go out somewhere and spend a weekend and felt I didn't do a good picture, I would actually feel bad, I would. The Civil War battlefield pictures, I did a lot of motion where I moved the camera and threw the lens out of focus and I got grizzly -- the statues, they have so many monuments like in Gettysburg, with different brass monuments -- just to photograph them realistically didn't mean anything to me. So I would change them. I would move the camera, or I would knock it out of focus a little bit, or something like that. I would make them like death masks, like the people were actually dying. Or I would just take a hand just dripping down, and maybe when it was raining have water dripping off the hand, it almost looked like blood coming out of the fingers. There was a lot of things you could do with a little imagination. You could change things around. You don't have to point a lens at something and take it the way it is. You have to see a little beyond the surface.

Thomas Dublin

George Harvan

I think we should mention about the Molly Maguires, the pictures I took for Paramount. When Paramount came into this area to do a movie, they selected Eckley as one of their prime shooting places. And when Joe Boyle and I - Joe Boyle was the editor of the Times News in Jim Thorpe at the time, in fact he owned it with his sister Gertrude - we decided to go up one day to see what they were doing. They were in the process, then, of digging up the streets, and taking down all the wires and everything else to make this into a 1870 mine-patch town. And I started photographing the town, as it evolved into a movie set. And when Paramount came up, and they started to shoot up at Eckley, I took some pictures, and came home, printed them, a few days later, took them back up. And I saw the PR guy, and he said, Well, these are nothing unusual. Our photographer could do things like this." I thought, "Well, yes he could." So, I went home. I had a grain screen - it's a screen that you put down over your print, as you're making it - it gives it a real dirty old look, a rough look. So I printed up a dozen or so, and took them back up, and then he said, "Well, now these are different." And as they were shooting the different scenes up at Eckley, I was able to get on close to the set. From that group of pictures, I compiled enough pictures so that I was able to put a book together, a couple years afterward. This was in '67, I think. I put the book out in '69.

Thomas Dublin

George Harvan

Tower City was in March of 1977. It was a day almost like Port Griffith, not quite as cold, but it was in March. That disaster was also caused by a flooding. Evidently some water had built up in the dam in one of the old workings, and then when the men entered the gangway, the water, instead of breaking in from the ceiling, broke in from the bottom and started to flood the mine. I also heard about that on the radio. I found out where Tower City was and decided to go there. I spent a number of days photographing the rescue teams who were hoping to get the men out. They did locate a fellow by the name of Ronald Adley. Evidently, he got up into an air pocket, where the water hadn't reached, and he was able to get enough air to survive. After they did locate him, we were notified. Everyday they would go in with different crews to try to clear enough debris to get him out safely. The press was staying up in a trailer which the state brought in, and that's where we slept. One evening the rescue people said they were going to bring Adley out at nine o'clock the next morning. When you're sleeping in a trailer, you don't get too much rest. So, I got up early and with another fellow, a photographer from The Reading Eagle, headed for the tunnel mouth and after a while, we see a series of lights coming toward us, and they were getting bigger and bigger. Adley had decided he didn't want to be carried out. He wanted to walk out, and when he walked out of the mine, we were able to get photographs of him as he emerged from the tunnel.

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Thomas Dublin

George Harvan

I wouldn't say fortunate -- but I was able to, in my time, I was able to cover three of them, to photograph three of them. I guess the first was up at the Knox mine disaster, up at Pittston, when twelve were killed, when the Susquehanna River broke through. The miners just got a little bit too close. The roof got a little bit close to the Susquehanna River, and the river broke through and it was in January of 1959. I heard about it on the radio, and it was another one of those things, I don't know why you go to them, but you're part of the region. And in '59, it was just about four or five years, about four years after the mines closed here. They were still working up at Wilkes-Barre. Deep mining was still operating up there. But after the river went through, that was the end of deep mining in the Wyoming Valley. I don't have too many pictures of that, because by the time I got up there, I don't have any pictures of any of the men being brought out. But I do have a few photographs showing the town and the people, waiting, to see what's going to happen. I have numerous pictures of people dropping in huge railroad gondolas to try to breach this hole in the Susquehanna. That was kind of an eerie scene with the ice flowing down the river, and then this river just swallowing up these huge mine gondolas.

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