Many scholars of David Lynch agree that he produced some of his best work toward the end of his career, Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), especially part 8. The black-and-white film jumps back to 1956 and centers on a dark, terrifying miner character who, for some reason, is called “The Woodcutter.” Maybe he was a lumberjack, but he looked like a miner. Between the footage of him and the Trinity nuclear tests, the episode hints that we’re seeing the root of evil in not only Twin Peaks but America as a whole. This was the height of TV reruns, with fashion magazine bloggers posting frantic posts such as “Trying to make sense of the show’s craziest episode.”
“Under the Surface: Mining and American Photography” opens at the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Hertzfield Center for Photography and Media Arts after being held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and brings together approximately 140 works spanning 180 years, ranging from daguerreotypes to wall-sized inkjet prints. The exhibition shares the same goal as Part 8, which is to examine the beauty and horror at the heart of quintessential American industry. As Lynch criticizes television as a medium twin peaksThe show has a similar big idea: Photography has always operated on record extraction as well as on it, whether it was silver and copper in the daguerreotype era or copper, lithium and oil in mobile phones.
The exhibition establishes photographs as documentary and aesthetic objects, although we hardly need such a frame Malakoff Diggins (North Broomfield, Nevada County) [California] (1871), one of the first works exhibited. Photographer Carleton E. Watkins came to California in search of gold and found nothing, but the North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Company eventually hired him to photograph the state’s largest hydraulic gold mining operation in order to raise funds overseas. The result is an otherworldly scene, grounded only by the water pipes running on the trestle in the foreground. Behind the scenes, mining activity has carved the gravel into a bizarre landscape of spikes and tree stumps. Years later, farmers downstream used another photographer’s view of the same pit as evidence in court. In 1884, Judge Lorenzo Sawyer halted the dumping of mining waste in a 225-page ruling (Woodruff v. North Broomfield Gravel Mining Co.) that is often called California’s first environmental ruling.
This early work is a conversation with Mary Mattingly, one of the show’s newest creations years of silence (2018), which also draws attention to piles of countless, oddly colored stones. The piece grew out of her research into cobalt, starting with the battery in her own camera and leading her through the Eagle Mine in Michigan to the Congo. This is a collage of real life: a wooden box with mineral samples on top. The yellow hose and rope are reminiscent of the system the ore would flow through and the corkboards of movie conspiracy theorists, although when it comes to mining, the conspiracies all seem to be real.
Richard Avedon’s work is as quintessentially American as those paranoid theories, so his work makes sense. Tom Stroud, oil field worker, Velma, Oklahoma, June 12, 2080 (1980) was used to inject some humanity into the presentation of this great idea. Between 1979 and 1984, Avedon traveled to 17 states and 189 towns, shooting 752 scenes and 17,000 8×10 frames. He photographs ranch hands, drifters, and drillers against seamless white backgrounds, preferably at the end of a shift. Stroud has a rough coating from helmet to forearm and print size is 56 inches. Like the woodcutter, he is both man and landscape.