Jon Chase
March 15 – June 5, 2022
Artist Reception - March 20, 2022 - 4 to 6pm
Artist Talk - April 19, 2022 7 to 8pm Online
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- Coal miners on graveyard shift, Twilight, W.VA. © Jon Chase
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- © Jon Chase
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- Railroad worker, WV. When West Virginia became a state in 1863, 90 percent of its population lived on farms. In 1873, the Chesapeake & Ohio (C&O) railroad finally connected southern West Virginia with the East Coast. By the early 20th century, branches of the C&O, Norfolk & Western, and the Virginian railroads extended into every coal-producing hollow in southern West Virginia. They served two main purposes: importing miners, and exporting coal. Between 1880 and 1920, southern West Virginia’s population grew from 93,000 to 446,000, due almost entirely to the coal industry. © Jon Chase
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- Mother and daughter, Rowe Restaurant, Algoma, West Virginia, 1978. © Jon Chase This combination restaurant/bar was like many in coal country, open early and late to serve miners working around-the-clock shifts. Men came in for beers after the graveyard shift ended, while others ate breakfast before starting work. The day I came by a fist fight broke out between two burly brothers in their late teens. A few punches were thrown, but it was quickly broken up. I was sitting with the woman pictured, whose husband was the owner. She got very teary and upset, despite no one getting hurt. When I asked why, she explained she hated to see brothers fight. She went on to relate how years earlier two brothers began fighting, and the place was getting torn up. Her husband told them to stop, to no avail. He raised his shotgun from behind the bar and repeated his demand. The two charged him, and he fired his gun. Seconds later, two brothers lay dead on the barroom floor. No charges were ever brought. That was justice in the back hills of West Virginia.
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- A woman handles a rattlesnake at a church service in Micco, West Virginia in 1979. The minister standing behind her with arms outstretched lost his 15-year-old son to a rattlesnake bite a month earlier. Snake handling is based on a line from the Bible urging people to pick up serpents as a symbol of their faith in God. If a person gets bitten, it is said to happen either because their faith was not strong, or they picked up the snake without being instructed to do so by the Lord. Micco is named for the Main Island Creek Coal Company. © Jon Chase
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- A coal miner takes a short break on the graveyard shift in an underground mine in Twilight, W. VA. Twilight is in Boone County, West Virginia, with a 2010 population of 90. The Twilight surface mine, which flattened and stripped an expanse of heavily-forested mountains covering more than 3.5 square miles, has met most of its official clean-up requirements. But Dustin White, whose father was a miner with West Virginia roots going back 11 generations, says: “It’s all to give the illusion that they’ve reclaimed these sites, when basically it’s dead land. Any novice gardener can tell you that you can’t grow much in what is essentially clay mud and shell rock, and that’s all that’s left over when mining is done. All the topsoil has been dumped into the valleys, and it’s just this barren landscape. © Jon Chase
Jon Chase’s intimate view of Appalachia, made in 1978 and 1979 highlights the grit, determination and personal stories of the coal miners that live and work in the mountains of Coal Country.
About Jon Chase –
I have been a staff photographer at Harvard University for the past 27 years. I got my start in photography by taking a six-week introductory course at Rochester Institute of Technology in 1973. Following that, I came to the Boston area and moved to Newton Corner, where I began to photograph my neighbors in an old apartment building. This led to my obtaining a grant from the Mass. Foundation for the Humanities to produce a book of photos and interviews with people on all sides of what became a city-wide controversy when a developer bought the property. In 1987, The Fight for Newton Corner was published and distributed free of charge to every town and city planner in Massachusetts.
I subsequently moved to Cambridge and worked for several newspapers as well as Associated Press in Boston. In Cambridge I again photographed my neighbors, this time in a residential hospice on my block over a period of two years. Other projects include prison inmates at the Billerica House of Correction, coal miners and local people in Appalachia, and orphanages and flood victims in China. I have always felt an affinity for people living outside the mainstream, and that has been the focus of almost all my personal work.
I am a strong believer in combining words with photos, both to provide historical context and to add anecdotal information that personalizes the images. I have done that with my photographs of coal miners, which are mostly portraits, but which also document a specific time in the history, often violent, of coal mining in those areas of Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia known as Coal Country.
I live in Acton with my wife Louisa, with my adult daughter Maya living nearby.
