Your search

With essays by Donald Macgillivary and Allan Sekula and editing by Benjamin Buchloh and Robert Wilkie, this volume published a major selection from the photographic archives of Leslie Shedden, a local photographer active from the 1940s to the 1960s in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia. Besides his daily and common functions as a community photographer (portraits, advertising, work and school events, architecture), Leslie Shedden continuously worked on documentation of the working conditions in the coal and iron mines of Cape Breton. The photographic documentation was commissioned by the local coal mining corporation, which gave him access to the underground mines as well as to all other work areas. All major aspects of the mining activities, the conditions of manual labour, and the gradual transformation to mechanized mining are recorded in systematic and detailed photographs. An equally detailed systematic body of photographs recording the family and community life of the miners complements the body of photographic images documenting the labour conditions in one of the oldest North American coal mining districts.