Cape Breton University Press
Titles appearing in Reference — Research Book News — August 2008
Seven miles deep; mining faces from the Owen Fitzgerald collection.
Beaton Institute of Cape Breton Studies.
Cape Breton University Press, ©2007 196 p. $29.95 TR681
978-1-897009-25-3
Beginning in the mid 1970s and continuing for about two decades, photographer Owen Fitzgerald documented the coal mining operations on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, Canada. His focus was on the miners themselves, especially their faces, and the this collection of his photographs is more a work of portraiture than it is an attempt to record the typical daily experience of the miners, although a fair number of pictures showing miners operating machinery, eating their lunches, riding in the "rake boxes" that carried the miners down into the mines, and the like are included as well. The captions are taken from interviews with the miners themselves. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
