Stock Photography
In the early 1980’s while I was completing my Masters in Photography at Brooklyn College, I had also signed on with a stock agency named “Stock Boston”. The company flew me to Boston for my final interview. They wanted black and white photographs for books, advertisers, illustrators, newspapers, magazines on any and every subject you could dream of. So I invented stories and photographed anyone and everywhere I could think of.
I spent time in central Pennsylvania in a small town named Mt. Carmel. My mother had grown up there and I was anxious to see where she came from. In its heyday, in the 1940’s the population was almost 20,000. [ Today the population is less than 6,000 people.]The main industry was coal mining and manufactories of shirts, stockings, silk and planning mills. My grandfather was a coal miner. He was the first one to enter the mine with a canary. If it lived that meant the mine was safe to work in.
Besides spending time at the last coal mine in that area, I was directed to some very elderly miners who had been in Mt Carmel their entire lives. The gentleman I photographed in his home was 94 and still had lots of stories to tell me.
The photograph is about the passage of time. Stacked up paintings on the right once adorned the now empty walls, the almost haunting face from a painting reflected in the mirror- maybe himself as a child, or a child he once had. Work hat still close at hand, once a miner always a miner. Religious momentous surround him even in his last days.
Luckily, many of my photographs were selected by Stock Boston and used over and over. Somewhere out there a child sitting in class may have opened a textbook to find one of my photographs on the page. A History book is ready for an adult in college and silently my photographs are viewed. Perhaps you will find one the next time you open a book. Enjoy!!
