One Fine Show: “Mining and American Photography” at the Milwaukee Art Museum
Observer ·
This traveling survey gathers 180 years of images capturing the grandeur and devastation of extraction. The result is a powerful meditation on landscape, labor, exploitation and consumption.
Many scholars of David Lynch would agree that he made some of his best work near the end of his career , in Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), specifically Part 8. The black-and-white installment jumps back to 1956 and centers on a sooty, terrifying miner character known, for some reason, as the Woodsman. Maybe he’s a lumberjack, but he looks like a miner. Between him and the footage of the Trinity nuclear test, the episode implies that we’ve seen the origins of the evil at the heart not just of Twin Peaks but of America as a whole. This was the era of peak television recapping, and bloggers at fashion magazines filed frantic dispatches like “Trying to Make Sense of the Show’s Most Bonkers Episode.”
“Beneath the Surface: Mining and American Photography” opened at the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Herzfeld Center for Photography and Media Arts after its run at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., gathering some 140 works spanning 180 years, from daguerreotypes to wall-sized inkjet prints. The exhibition shares Part 8’s goal of examining the beauty and horror at the heart of a quintessentially American industry. And just as Lynch was critiquing television as a medium in Twin Peaks , the show hangs on a similarly big conceit: photography has always documented extraction while also running on it, whether silver and copper in the daguerreotype era or the copper, lithium and petroleum in a phone.
The show establishes the photographs as documents as well as aesthetic objects, though we hardly need that framing for Malakoff Diggins, North Bloomfield, Nevada County [California] (1871), one of the earliest works on view. The photographer Carleton E. Watkins came to California looking for gold and never found any, but the North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Company eventually hired him to photograph the largest hydraulic gold operation in the state so it could raise money abroad. The result is an otherworldly scene, grounded only by the water pipe running on trestles across the foreground. Behind it, the mining has carved the gravel into an alien landscape of pinnacles and stumps. A few years later, farmers downstream entered another photographer’s views of the same pit as evidence in court, and in 1884, Judge Lorenzo Sawyer halted the dumping of mining debris in a 225-page decision (Woodruff v. North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Co.) often described as California’s first environmental ruling.
“ Beneath the Surface: Mining and American Photography “ Artists: Various Venue: Milwaukee Art Museum Address: 700 N Art Museum Dr, Milwaukee, WI Through: January 18, 2027
This early work is in conversation with one of the newest in the show, Mary Mattingly ’s A Silence Contained for Years (2018), which also draws the eye to piles of untold, curiously colored stones. The piece grew out of her research into cobalt, which began with the battery in her own camera and led her through Michigan’s Eagle Mine to the Congo. It’s a real-life collage: a wooden crate topped with ore samples. Yellow hoses and strings conjure both the systems this ore will flow through and the corkboards of movie conspiracy theorists, though when it comes to mining, the conspiracies all seem to turn out to be real.
The work of Richard Avedon is as quintessentially American as those paranoid theories, so it makes sense that his Tom Stroud, oil field worker, Velma, Oklahoma, 6/12/80 (1980) is used to inject some humanity to this show of big ideas. Between 1979 and 1984, Avedon moved through 17 states and 189 towns, 752 sittings and 17,000 sheets of 8-by-10 film. He shot ranch hands, drifters and roughnecks against seamless white, preferably at the end of a shift. Stroud is coated in crude from hard hat to forearms and printed at 56 inches. Like the Woodsman, he is man and landscape all at once.