Mining Pictures: Stories from Above and Below Ground: Block Museum - Northwestern University
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Mining Pictures: Stories from Above and Below Ground

Bruce Davidson's Welsh Miners
February 4-April 2, 2017
Katz Gallery
Bruce Davidson, Untitled [detail] from the portfolio "Welsh Miners" (1965) © Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos, Collection of the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art. (2001.26)

Mining Pictures: Stories from Above and Below Ground looks at ways artists and other image makers construct narratives about industry. The exhibition features artworks and documents of mining, and the complex networks of power, technology, and family and labor relations that keep this industry in motion. In bringing these works together, Mining Pictures seeks to illuminate the representational tropes of scientific progress and human sentiment and expose the constructed quality of the visual stories about industry. The exhibition spotlights the mining photography of Bruce Davidson and W. Eugene Smith, and sets their work in conversation with prints, drawings, and photographs from the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries.