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Photographer Louie Palu’s images hark back to an era when point of view and personal vision were more common.

These days, much of the imagery you see published is homogeneous, meant to be distributed to the widest possible audience. A sense of authorship has waned. Yet Palu has found a way to persist.

Palu’s work on how photography is implicated in environmental decay through mining is a good example. This work would not have been possible without guts and determination. It is not a story that would be splashed across the pages or pixels of most general-interest publications.

I’ll let Palu take it from here, in his own words, on what his project “Cage Call” is all about.

“The screen you are looking at can act as an illusion. In photography it’s where we see and share all of our images. However, if we look beyond our images and selfies formed by pixels on digital devices, there are materials with an alternative narrative that in the history of photography begins with the mining of silver. It’s come time we acknowledge where photography really begins, which is in the mine.

“This past fall, an exhibition of my project ‘Cage Call’ at the Image Centre in Toronto curated by Gaelle Morel opened and created a dialogue. The goal of the exhibition was to connect people to the rarely discussed materiality of photography and Canada’s role in it.

“The title of the work ‘Cage Call’<i> </i>combines two elements of working underground. The first, ‘cage,’ refers to the elevator which takes you into the depths of the mine. And ‘call.’ The two combined means the call to go underground.

Louie Palu

“Canada is one of the world’s mining capitals. Long before many of us used the word ‘globalization,’ Canadian-based and Toronto Stock Exchange-listed mining companies and banks were moving mining stocks and resource-based industry financing worldwide, and still do.

“Meanwhile, northern towns like Cobalt, Ontario, are now the graveyards of photography. The silver is no longer in the ground having been mined out, sold and taken away.

“That silver is fixed into prints in museums around the world. Cobalt, once the world’s richest and biggest producers of silver, and also supplier to Kodak, now exists as a mined-out warning beacon to what the cruel resource extraction cycle looks like.

“Mining from Cobalt spread to grow international mining powerhouses in towns like Sudbury, Timmins, Kirkland Lake and Elliot Lake, where they mined gold, copper, nickel, zinc, uranium, rare-earth metals, platinum and more.

“When I worked on ‘Cage Call’ from 1991 to 2003, I found the mining process was complex, hard to explain and inaccessible. Before I made these photographs, this hard-to-explain and inaccessible process seemed like an illusion that was propagated by a system of capitalism that extracts the silver from the mine and presents it to us in a nice cardboard box containing either film or a shiny new digital device.

“‘Cage Call’ was an attempt to use photography to disrupt the very illusion that prevents us from seeing something — photography is the material and labor from the mine, not only the image.

“The book ‘Mining Photography: The Ecological Footprint of Image Production’ (Spector, 2022) is an excellent starting point to expand your thinking about all of this. It includes an essay by Dr. Siobhan Angus, who addresses the point I am making, that photography cannot exist without mining, and therefore we should acknowledge our role in its effects on communities and the environment.

“For me there are many steps in the photographic process before you put that roll of film in the camera or send those gigs of images to the cloud, which is powered by coal and nuclear energy mined from the earth. Dr. Angus understands this narrative all too well having grown up in Cobalt.

“Angus’s upcoming book ‘Camera Geologica’ (Duke, 2024) expands this critical discussion at a time when we all must acknowledge the effects of industrialization on our planet, including photography.

“Before Dr. Angus wrote her essay I worked with her father, Charlie Angus, two decades ago when he was a journalist. We spent years documenting the mines and communities in northern Canada in an unprecedented scope and manner. If you look at this work and want to further disrupt romantic narratives around photography, Dr. Angus’s book is a good starting point.

“‘Cage Call’ at its core is a challenge and discussion about us seeing the workers and communities that make things for us that come at a cost, we owe it to them and ourselves to acknowledge it.”

Missouri School of Journalism

Mercer University

University of Oxford

Kenneth Dickerman is a photo editor. He previously worked as a photo editor at MSN in Seattle and TIME in New York City. Before that, he worked as a freelance photographer specializing in politics and conflict and his work appeared in The New York Times, TIME and US News & World Report among other publications. 

Kenneth Dickerman

washpost

Photos of mining in Canada

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Cage Call: Life and Death in the Hard Rock Mining Belt

Louie Palu/Agence VU

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The things we do can come at a heavy cost, even photography