| Anthracite Ghosts documents a photographer's romance with northeastern Pennsylvania's fast disappearing mine structures. Walter Dinteman, a veteran photographer, has spent several years roaming the area to film abandoned coal breakers and related buildings which are the crumbling monuments to another era. His photographs are not merely pictures of the buildings. Instead, he has moved in close to capture the texture of weathered wood, the pattern created by broken window panes, and the poignant mood called forth by long-stilled machinery. |
| "These old structures fascinated me because they lent themselves to photography," says Dinteman. "Then it seemed to me that as fast as I was photographing them, they were being torn down. I decided I had better hurry around and shoot as many as I could before it was too late. I wish I had come to this region earlier, because a great many of the buildings have disappeared in the past few years." |
| From Carbondale through the Lackawanna Valley to Taylor, on down the line to WilkesBarre, Hazelton, Eckley, Shenandoah, Shamokin, and way points, the photographer has walked among the ghosts of men long gone from the face and the tipple. "As you walk around these places," he says, "you find the ghosts everywhere. In the wash house, for instance, there'll be a pair of tattered trousers or a clothes basket with one shoe in it hanging from the wall. One thing that moved me was a stretcher, its canvas all rotten and tattered, leaning against a wall, a reminder of the high number of fatal accidents in coal mining. And if you go up high in the building, nine or ten floors above ground, you can hear the ghosts in the wind that whistles through broken windows." |
| In making his pictorial record, Dinteman has come to be deeply involved with his ghosts. "When I am around these buildings," he says, "I think of the things that went on: the hard lives of the men and their families, the stables of mules spending their lives underground, the legend of the Molly Maguires, the strikes and strikebreakers and the people really getting their heads bashed in. But I am not depressed. The whole scene is nostalgic and I become excited because it's as though I were walking back into an almost forgotten time. After I've gone to these places and have spent three or four solitary hours roaming around it, I feel as though I have some share in its history, as though I had lost a friend." |
| Does Dinteman feel any kinship with John Horgan, the well-known photographer of the coal mining industry? |
| "In a way, yes," he replies. "Horgan and I both roamed through the mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania, photographing the anthracite coal scene. However, he lived between 1840 |
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