Milwaukee Art Museum Hosts“Mining And American Photography” Exhibition

(MENAFN- USA Art News) The exhibition“Beneath the Surface: Mining and American Photography,” which previously showed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., is now on view at the Milwaukee Art Museum's Herzfeld Center for Photography and Media Arts. The installation features approximately 140 works and spans 180 years of photography, from daguerreotypes to contemporary inkjet prints.

This exhibition aims to explore the interplay of beauty and horror within a key American industry, paralleling the critical approach seen in David Lynch's 2017 series Twin Peaks: The Return, specifically its eighth part. Just as Lynch critiqued television as a medium, the exhibition posits that photography has always documented extraction, while also relying on mined materials such as silver and copper in early processes, and lithium, petroleum, and copper in modern digital devices.

Among the earliest pieces is Carleton E. Watkins's Malakoff Diggins, North Bloomfield, Nevada County [California] ( 1871 ), which captures the largest hydraulic gold operation in California at the time. Watkins, originally a gold prospector, was commissioned by the North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Company to photograph the site for fundraising. This image, depicting an otherworldly landscape carved by mining, contrasts with an early 21st-century work, Mary Mattingly's A Silence Contained for Years ( 2018 ), which stemmed from her research into cobalt, tracing its journey from a camera battery to Michigan's Eagle Mine and then to the Congo. Mattingly's piece is a collage of ore samples in a wooden crate, with hoses and strings symbolizing extraction systems.

Photographs of the North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Company pit were later used as court evidence by downstream farmers. In 1884, Judge Lorenzo Sawyer issued a 225-page decision in Woodruff v. North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Co., halting the dumping of mining debris. This ruling is often recognized as California's first environmental law. Additionally, Richard Avedon's Tom Stroud, oil field worker, Velma, Oklahoma, 6/12/80 ( 1980 ) is included, offering a human perspective. Avedon photographed ranch hands, drifters, and roughnecks across 17 states and 189 towns between 1979 and 1984, producing 17,000 sheets of 8-by-10 film from 752 sittings. Stroud's portrait, coated in crude oil, measures 56 inches and is presented as a merging of man and landscape.

The exhibition is located at 700 N Art Museum Dr, Milwaukee, WI and will run through January 18, 2027.

Source: Observer Arts

MENAFN06112026005694012507ID1111926836