Browsing Items (331 total)

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…

Oral History: Part 1 of Thomas Dublin's interview with George Harvan

Oral History: Part 2 of Thomas Dublin's interview with George Harvan

Oral History: Part 3 of Thomas Dublin's interview with George Harvan

Oral History: Part 4 of Thomas Dublin's interview with George Harvan

Image: Harvan photographed Ferrence, then retired, with one foot raised on the caterpillar tread of the diesel shovel he had collected on his farm; he didn't carry the weight of his earlier years, but he still had the same slight smile and confident gaze.…

Image: 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.

Image: 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…

Image: The Harvan family, 1922. Anna Harvan holds George in her lap.

Image: George Harvan at a CCC Camp, 1941.

Image: Gabe Ferrence in 1978 in front of a dragline shovel at the Springdale strippings, one of several eighty-year-old veterans of the region's mines and garment factories, many of whom Harvan had known for forty or fifty years.

Image: Portraits of Jimmy Gross and Johnny Swann by Bill Bamberger

Image: Earl Dotter's Scotia Mine Disaster-her husband survived Vietnam to die in a coal mine.

Image: Earl Dotter's portrait of a bituminous miner from Logan, West Virginia

Image: Machine Shop, Glace Bay, 1959. Shop personnel in front and on top of the Dosco Continuous Miner.

Image: Leslie Shedden's photograph of Dosco's underground mining operations in Cape Breton, No. 18 Colliery, 1953. This view is of the Dosco Miner in action, with the cutting job gouging into the coal face on the downward cycle.

Image: 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…

Image: 1936 photograph Walker Evans took of an Alabama tenant farmer, Floyd Burroughs, published in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In the second image, Burroughs and his family, in his Sunday best surrounded by his wife, sister-in-law, and four clean, nicely…

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…

Oral History: Part 5 of Thomas Dublin's interview with George Harvan

Oral History: George Harvan reflects on his life and career

Oral History: George Harvan reflects on his life and career

Oral History: Flags, cemeteries, and other geometric shapes allowed Harvan to use a pinhole technique to reflect on what we often discard

Oral History: Harvan reveals interesting techniques with the use of a Polaroid camera

Oral History: Abandoned buildings provide us with glimpses into the past and reveal much about life today

Oral History: Unique and surprising mannequins provided Harvan an opportunity to reflect on the fragility of life

Oral History: Nearby Gettysburg provided Harvan the opportunity to reflect on life, death, and the human struggle in a historical setting that is very much alive today

Oral History: Harvan discusses the process involved in photographing on the film set of the Molly Maguires, shot locally in PA

Oral History: Two mine disasters, at Knox, and Sheppton are the subject of a series

Oral History: Two mine disasters, at Knox, and Sheppton are the subject of a series