Last Holler for Coal Hollow

Don’t miss your last chance to see the photography exhibit Coal Hollow, on view now through October 29 at the Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona, Florida.

The exhibit consists of arresting black-and-white photos and oral histories of the coal-mining legacy in southern West Virginia. On October 25, the museum will hold an open house and reception to meet the exhibiting artists, Ken and Melanie Light. The evening will include a lecture by Ken at 7:00 p.m. The following morning, the Lights will hold a seminar and open-classroom session entitled “History, Journalism and Documentary Photography.”

The book accompanying the project, Coal Hollow: Photographs and Oral Histories, includes nearly one hundred glossy photographs, along with forewords by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and Orville Schell, Dean of the School of Journalism at UC Berkeley.

Bringing the work full circle, the Lights recently received a grant from the Open Society Institute to distribute their documentary photographic project in an alternative way: They have created multimedia kits— containing the book and DVD versions of Coal Hollow, along with laminated text and image panels—which will be given to targeted public libraries in West Virginia. In due course, this project will allow people all over West Virginia to access information about this hidden catastrophe.