Coalscapes

(Work in Progress — Last update: 9 December 2009)

Click on any of the images for a larger view.

The place is the edge of a former lignite mine in the East German Lausitz region (Lusatia), one of the world's premier coal reserves. The time is June 2009. The lake in the distance is rising very slowly to fill up the Restloch, the residual hole that is left in the ground after the coal has been taken out.No Trespassing!
Risk of Death! Its waters are supposed to lap one day at the toes of vacationers reclining lazily on the deck. Such bliss is still a while off, however. This is because, for one thing, the hole is large and only one among many that compete for the water from a small river. For another, these post-mining landscapes can be more treacherous than generally thought, as a recent landslide showed very dramatically. And thirdly, the water in the lakes proves to be much more acidic than assumed and will probably require extensive chemical or biological treatment. The leisure water world may indeed be decades away, for all we know. In the interim, the mayor of the adjacent town of Großräschen busies himself advertising lakeside plots for development. His enthusiasm can seem moving and encouraging one day and desperate the next.

The nascent lake in the photograph above is Lake Ilse (webcam). Ilse was one of the many daughters and wives memorialized by the industrialists of the 19th century as namesakes for their sundry ventures. Mines and factories routinely carried names like Erika, Wilhelmine, Clara, Viktoria, Jenny, Renate, Eva, or Anna-Mathilde.A part of the emerging network of artificial lakes (The shaft mine Dora gained the most notoriety among the lot as a Nazi missile factory and slave labor concentration camp.) Later, under the auspices of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the old patriarchal naming rite was deemed unsuitable for a manly socialist undertaking. The open cast mine Ilse-Ost (Ilse-East) thus became Tatkraft (vigor). There may have been some wishful thinking behind the new name since the exhaustion of the mine was already on the horizon. In the late 1950s, the authorities opened the Meuro mine nearby. Its flooding did not begin until well after the demise of the GDR, together with its naming rites, and so it is that Lake Ilse is now allowed to fill the remaining hole of Meuro. If all goes well, the lake will become part of the Lausitzer Seenland, a web of manmade lakes in one of Europe's most arid regions that will dwarf most natural European lake districts.

Perched high on the anticipated shore of Lake Ilse, right behind the deck and chairs above, is the brain trust and clearing house for everything to do with post-mining landscape planning and architecture in the region,Civilized birding in the desert. The sandy post-mining soil is colonized surprisingly quickly by plants that in turn attract animal life, including birds. The falcons were especially active in the midday sun.
IBA See, Großräschen the IBA Fürst-Pückler-Land. IBA is short for Internationale Bauausstellung or International Building Exhibition, and Prince Pückler is the patron saint of German landscape architecture, with two magnificent parks in the area to his credit. While the exhibition proper consists of projects in a number of different locales, its organizing forces occupy a handsome modern ensemble of buildings tied together into the IBA-Terrassen. Beside offices, the ensemble houses an elegant café, two exhibition spaces, an auditorium, and a bookstore replete with informational brochures and publications on industrial and cultural history, landscape and architecture. It is the ideal starting point for excursions into the mining and post-mining landscape. Moreover, it is itself one of the kinds of intervention that aim at attracting visitors by putting the coal landscape to new use.

There has been much skepticism about the prospect of attracting any but the most tortured souls to the desolation of a mining site. For those who wonder, therefore, what may have possessed the couple in the next image to search out such a place on their wedding day of all days, allow me to explain how these places first piqued my interest.A picture for the wedding album on a retooled piece of mining equipment slated to become a pier one day. New uses are imagined for machinery as well as the landscape.
IBA See, Großräschen My wife Wallis Miller and I had spent the night before our wedding anniversary seven years ago in a lovely bed-and-breakfast in the terribly quaint Eastern Townships in Québec, Canada. By midmorning the next day, after a sumptuous breakfast and a stroll around the neighborhood, our teeth were sticking together from all the loveliness and quaintness and sweetness surrounding us. Craving spicier fare, we searched the map for places with rugged sounding names and settled on Asbestos and Black Lake. We went and were not disappointed.

The view of the mining pit was breathtaking. It was presented with astonishing frankness. The photograph below is taken from a nicely designed overlook that beckons travellers to stop and linger.Asbestos mine.
Black Lake, Canada In the United States, at least in the parts I know, this would be inconceivable. A wasteland shown off as a site of engineering prowess and civic pride? An invitation to observe what it takes to supply an industrial society with the resources without which it would collapse the next day? Maybe the info panels at the outlook were a bit heavy on the PR, I don't remember. But they certainly beat barbed wire fences, guard dogs, and men with guns.

If the case for asbestos as sine qua non for civilization as we know it has become a bit shaky, the case for coal has not, at least not yet. And coal abounds near our home in Lexington, Kentucky, at the Western edge of Appalachia. I had driven through some of Appalachia's coal fields before, but I had never taken any worthwhile pictures there. After our return from Canada, I decided to give it another try. I recruited a friend with a rusty Ford Bronco, a Carolina accent, a baseball hat, and a ragged T-shirt who would blend in more easily than I do in my neat polo shirt and white Volkswagen Golf, not to mention my German accent and outlandish choice of words. (I once used the word indeed in a K-Mart store trying to explain that I was looking to buy a clothes-drying rack.) Together we set out to take a look at mountaintop removal in Eastern Kentucky.

Mountaintop removal or MTR is the most cost-effective way to mine thin seams of coal that are buried under thick layers of rock. The technique is straightforward: explode the mountain's top, dump the spoil into the valley, cart away the coal, and transfer the profits to another state. The environmental impact is disastrous. This is described most movingly in a piece by Erik Reece for Harper's Magazine, Death of a Mountain (enlarged into the book Lost Mountain). MTR occurs on a staggering scale all across Southern Appalachia and should provide plenty of photographic opportunities, or so I thought. But to my embarrassment I returned without a single image. I tried again, this time enlisting a friend who had grown up in the Kentucky mountains,Mountaintop Removal but again the results were not much to boast about. What was the problem? Looking back, I have come to think that there was not just one problem but a whole laundry list:

1. Topography. MTR happens, by definition, at the highest points in the landscape. Roads wind mostly through narrow valleys, hillsides are steep and densely forested. Consequently, there are very few accessible vistas.
2. Politics, lowercase p. Mining operators show no interest in publicising their activities. They do what they can to keep onlookers at bay. This involves all manner of bullying, including gunplay. Trespassing is not advised.
3. Politics, capital p. Since 9/11 at the latest, concerns of national security have served as a convenient pretext for harrassing photographers pretty much everywhere on public land. If you have ever tried to photograph a bridge, refinery or power plant using a tripod, you know whereof I speak.
4. Culture. Picture taking in Appalachia is notoriously difficult. There is a fog of ambiguity, suspicion, and resentment that surrounds photography in the region, to be appreciated, for example, in the documentary film Stranger with a Camera. Occasionally the fog lifts and all ambiguity evaporates, such as when my friend and I stumbled unwittingly into a clandestine nursery for fighting cocks.
5. Psychology. The anticipation of problems 2 through 4 makes them seem worse than they probably are. When in doubt, I tend to err on the side of caution and miss the occasion.

I shelved the project and turned instead to animal surgery. (Why didn't I try aerial photography? Because it feels to me like looking through binoculars the wrong way. I prefer to be close to and at eye-level with my subject.)

A while later, towards the end of 2008, I had the opportunity to photograph a decommissioned coal-fired power plant in Western Kentucky, which got me to think about mining again. My problems looked as daunting as ever, but as I was also contemplating what to do with myself on my next visit to the old home country, it dawned on me that I might look at coal mining there, both as a project in its own right and as a foil for possible future work in Appalachia or elsewhere.

Germany has two large coal fields, one in the far West, and one in the far East. Since Wallis and I were going to be stationed in Berlin (that's where she combs through archives in search of treasures for her work in architectural history), the natural direction to turn first was East, towards the Lausitz. In June 2009, I managed to spend four days altogether in the area, barely enough to get my bearings, but enough to whet my appetite, not least because because I experienced none of the problems that stumped me in Kentucky. The following pages combine my first impressions with an assortment of ancillary tidbits.