Copious Notes

The installation of "Honoring America's Coal Miners" at Georgetown College's Cochenour Gallery. Photos by Thorney Lieberman.

Thorney Lieberman spent years in New York trying to shoot architectural images of the city that replicated the experience of being in the presence of the actual objects.

“I had this idea if you looked out a 50- by 60-inch window, you should be able to replicate that experience of seeing what you see out of that window,” Lieberman says.

Coy and Carrisa is one of the images in Lieberman's exhibit.

But it never quite worked. “I never quite conquered the scale of New York ­architecture,” Lieberman says.

But he has with coal ­miners, and that is the major point of his exhibit, Honoring America’s Coal Miners, which is at Georgetown College’s Cochenour Gallery through Oct. 7.

By creating life-size, ­detailed portraits of miners, Lieberman wants to put a human face on coal ­mining, which he thinks is often ­written off as a faceless industry.

Lieberman has come to ­regard the miners as ­“American heroes, engaged in dangerous work to supply us with energy,” he says in his artist’s statement.

The project began ­after ­Lieberman moved to ­Charleston, W.Va., where his wife, Anne, grew up. They were just settling into the Mountain State when the Sago Mine disaster of Jan. 2, 2006, took the lives of 12 miners.

The event garnered national media attention for days, and Lieberman became aware, “This was the reality of West Virginia, and this was my community.”

While living in Colorado, Lieberman had worked on a project creating life-size, sharply detailed portraits of Native Americans, and he ­decided he wanted to do something similar with ­miners. He went to the United Mine Workers office around the corner from his home to start looking for people ­willing to pose for him.

For Lieberman’s style of photography, posing is not a small request.
His life-size portraits are created from separate images shot on 8- by 10-inch film. For instance, Coy and Carrisa, a portrait of a miner and his daughter, is made up of 34 separate images.

Lieberman’s camera is mounted on a 10-foot-tall frame that he moves down and across the subject’s body to photograph each part in 1-to-1 scale. That requires the subject to stand relatively still for 15 ­minutes, hit repeatedly with a flash that is “brighter than the sun,” Lieberman says.

And we’re not talking models here. These were coal miners, right after work.

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