Many of the qualities evident in Harvan's mining photos are also apparent in the photos he took outside the anthracite region. Two interrelated projects—exploring the Pennsylvania Amish and documenting country auctions—occupied Harvan for much of the 1960s, and reveal a basic continuity across the range of his documentary photographs.

Harvan seemed to enter the world of his varied subjects almost effortlessly. He did not disturb them, nor call attention to himself as photographer. Several other Amish photographs express these qualities. Consider Harvan's treatment of an Amish woman enjoying ice cream on a day when she had come into town for shopping—or his view of an Amish girl in a closed buggy, probably also on a market day. In both photos the subjects appear engrossed in their own worlds, oblivious of others, including the photographer. This was not accidental, but something that Harvan very consciously strove to achieve. In discussing these photographs, he commented:

I always photographed the Amish with respect. I never shoved my camera in their faces. They don't particularly like people photographing them. So I either did it with a long lens, which is kind of sneaky in a way, or a hidden camera. . . . I didn't want to invade anyone's privacy just to make a photograph. But you get the feeling that everything about them is unique and the people in their way dignified. . . . When you get into photography seriously, you sometimes feel you should pursue certain subjects. But you've got to do it with a certain amount of respect for the people you decide to photograph.[17]

Miss Della Keiser has sold out—lock, stock and barrel—at the rundown family farm near Normal Square, Pennsylvania. Now in her seventies and living in a home for the aged, she's the last survivor of an old and respected clan. So auctioneer Curtis Houser knocked down the time-worn possessions and, so doing, tolled the death of a household and the end of a family.[19]

This same development is evident in Harvan's photographs of the Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg. Compare Harvan's photograph of a southern general striding firmly into battle with his treatment of a cannon fairly bursting out of another picture. He made no effort in this sequence of photos to tell the story of the famous battle; rather, he photographed the monuments in a way which imparted motion and drama. In a metaphorical sense he brought the battle to life for his audience. As in his earlier documentary work, he sought not just the surface reality, but a deeper truth about people and events. The goals of the New York and Gettysburg series were consistent with that of his mine photographs, but the techniques Harvan used to achieve those ends were very different from the methods he employed earlier in his career.

This evolution is particularly striking in one set of photographs that stands apart from the main thrust of Harvan's photography—his mannequin series. As Harvan commented several times in interviews, he never posed a miner or directed his subjects how or where to stand.[20] In that way, Harvan emphasized the central reality of the scenes he photographed and underscored that he was telling others' stories. The mannequin series provided an interesting departure from his earlier form of expression.

The deterioration of the mannequin was almost like the deterioration of a human being. We go through various stages of our life. We're born, we live, we're young and healthy, we're strong and look good in the spring of our lives. Then we go into the summer of our life, the middle. At a certain point, we start to head downhill, to the fall and the winter of our lives. It reminded me—the deterioration of this mannequin—of our life as we live it. While the deterioration of the mannequin happened in one season, it takes us years.[21]

Several accounts of Depression-era documentary photographers of the Farm Security Administration show this contrast very clearly. Lawrence W. Levine wrote about a famous 1936 photograph Walker Evans took of an Alabama tenant farmer, Floyd Burroughs, published in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The photo shows Burroughs sitting in the doorway of his unpainted cabin, wearing a ripped work shirt with a couple of days of stubble on his cheeks. Evans took other photographs of Burroughs and his family, including a brighter, more optimistic image of Burroughs in his Sunday best surrounded by his wife, sister-in-law, and four clean, nicely dressed children. The published portrait emphasizes the toll the Depression had taken on an Alabama tenant farmer; the unpublished one the pride and dignity of a family facing hardships. Both photographs convey truths about Floyd Burroughs, but it is clear that Walker Evans chose the first one to make a point.[22] So, too, did George Harvan. In selecting photographs for exhibits, Harvan chose images that spoke to the dignity, the strong work ethic, and sense of self-respect he found among his mining neighbors. Though their lives were ones of constant struggle, in Harvan's work, they were not objects of pity.

The difference between Harvan's approach and that of Dorothea Lange is also instructive. Lange's well-known 1936 photograph, "Migrant Mother," captured 32-year-old Florence Thompson sitting under the shelter of a makeshift tent in a migrant labor camp in California. She has a baby in her lap and two older children leaning on her shoulder, but is facing away from the camera. The caption turns Florence Thompson into something of an ideal type. Levine noted, "Dorothea Lange never inquired after the name of the woman whose image she made immortal . . . never noted the names of the four daughters pictured in the series; never sought to learn the whereabouts of Thompson's other three children or her husband; and, so far as we can tell, never wondered where Florence Thompson had been or where she hoped to go. 'I did not ask her name or history,' Lange noted simply, as if this was the most reasonable possible action."[23] This was not Harvan's style. Unlike Lange, the resident photographer of the Panther Valley had an intimate knowledge of the life histories of the Lanscoal miners he photographed; he knew their hopes, their expectations, and the reasons they remained in a dying community rather than strike out for brighter economic prospects elsewhere. He understood these men not as sociological types but as individuals. His named portraits of the Lanscoal miners and the detailed captions of his photographs reflect that understanding.

The outsider/insider distinction is one distinction between Harvan and the FSA photographers of the Depression decade, but there is another difference that places Harvan within a broader context. Operating on a national, even an international stage, Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans brought a cosmopolitan perspective to their work. At several junctures in his life—when offered jobs with the Associated Press in Tokyo and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.—George Harvan could have joined that cosmopolitan world. Rather, he returned to the Panther Valley and the anthracite region of northeastern Pennsylvania, and chose a self-conscious provincialism.[24] We say "self-conscious" because he clearly made choices in his life. Moreover, he was not isolated and cut off from larger currents by the choices he made. He published his photographs in respected, national publications; he attended photographic exhibitions in New York City and became increasingly familiar with the best photographic work in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. But he came home to the anthracite region and fulfilled his compelling need to document miners and the last days of anthracite coal mining.

Machinery dominated Leslie Shedden's photographs of Dosco's underground mining operations in Cape Breton. As Shedden himself explained, "We didn't go down in the mines to take pictures of workmen, we went down to take pictures of machinery, of equipment."[26] Operations at Dosco differed from those at LC&N because the veins of bituminous coal ran horizontally in Cape Breton and were susceptible to mechanization, while hand operations continued to predominate in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania. Continuous mining machines and automatic conveyor belts played major roles in bituminous operations, but were conspicuously absent in anthracite mining. Equally important, Dosco manufactured and sold mining machinery and many of Shedden's pictures were used in company advertising.

Dotter's work has been well described by Walter Rosenblum, in an introduction to the portfolio In Mine and Mill. Rosenblum wrote, "his images contrast the danger and discomfort of mining with the dignity and heroism of the miners themselves." His description of Dotter at the funeral of one of the victims of the Scotia Mine disaster in 1976 could have applied to Harvan during the tense vigils after the disasters at Port Griffith and Sheppton some years earlier: "[His] presence at the moment of tragedy is remarkably unobtrusive, as though he wears a cloak of invisibility. But this is not accidental. He has paid his dues in the five years of working and living with miners who regarded him as a member of their families."[28] Dotter and Harvan came to their photography from different backgrounds, but they were cut from the same cloth in the way they operated, and in the way they related to miners. Both show us, in Rosenblum's words, the "heroism and simple dignity" of men and women who led hard lives in mining communities.

This perspective is shared by Bill Bamberger, whose photographs in Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory portray furniture workers caught in the throes of deindustrialization as the North Carolina factory where they had worked for ten or twenty years closed down. Bamberger had to win the workers' trust, but over a five-month period the firm's employees accepted the photographer and opened up to him. Bamberger caught his subjects at work, relaxing during breaks, learning of the plant closing, and reading or signing their pension forms. As in George Harvan's photographs, Bamberger offers many engaging views of the work process, but his focus is on the workers, rather than on the machinery or the final products. He too is drawn to portraits that express the dignity and self-respect of men and women caught in circumstances over which they exercise no control. As in Harvan's work, broad economic and social changes take on a human face in Bamberger's photographs.

Dotter, Bamberger, and Harvan all build on traditions of realistic portraiture developed by the FSA photographers, but they empathize and identify with their subjects rather than sympathize for them. Their work communicates respect rather than pity.

Historical Essay Introduction | Historical Essay 1 | Historical Essay 2