Maine photographer Dennis Welsh traveled to the mining town of Cyclone, W. Va., to help him understand the history of the American coal industry. Photo by Dennis Welsh

After narrowly losing a bid for a seat in the Maine House of Representatives, Yarmouth photographer Dennis Welsh traveled to coal country in West Virginia to learn about an industry, a lifestyle and an entire social fabric that felt unfamiliar and maybe even a little foreign.

Though they may seem unrelated, Welsh’s candidacy for state office in Maine and his trip to Appalachia were both about listening and learning.

Welsh might have been disappointed in the outcome of his House race in 2018, but he enjoyed the process too much for any disappointment to linger. While knocking on doors and meeting people, Welsh realized how much he benefited from listening to his neighbors – and how his career as a commercial photographer had prepared him for his moment. In his professional work for clients like Apple, Cabela’s and the United Way, he is accustomed to talking with people whom he doesn’t know about their lives and matters important to them, so he can portray them humanely and accurately.

Dennis Welsh, back home in Maine. Photo courtesy of Dennis Welsh

His ability to listen and observe also made him a good candidate. “I remember on the first day of campaigning, I had my clipboard in hand with a sheet of names of the voters whose doors I’d be knocking on. The list I had shared their names, their party affiliation, voting history, etc. – all good stuff,” he said. “But then I realized, I’m an independent. I don’t want to know this stuff. I simply want to meet my community. And after that day, I ditched the clipboard and just walked door to door. It was marvelous.”

He lost to a three-term incumbent by a small margin, but out of that defeat came what Welsh describes as “a renewed willingness to sit down with anyone, particularly folks whose lives don’t intersect with mine in any way, and seek out areas of common ground. It has been one of the most pivotal lessons of my career.”

In a time of divisiveness and misunderstanding, Welsh’s local lesson in silo-busting felt almost like an epiphany, and it took him deep into the mining country of West Virginia, so he could better comprehend the conversations happening in the United States over the future of the coal industry specifically and climate change generally. Both had become political issues, and Welsh, 56, wanted to understand them at the community and human level.

“I was listening to Trump saying we are going to bring back ‘clean, beautiful coal.’ I don’t know anything about coal, but I had never heard it referenced as clean and beautiful. That made me very curious,” Welsh said. “I wanted to learn more.”

A miner’s hands. Photo by Dennis Welsh

He applied what he learned knocking on doors in Yarmouth on a national scale to better understand his neighbors, near and far. Before the pandemic hit, Welsh spent a week in Cyclone, West Virginia, a small community with a big mine, and a place he had never visited, to take black-and-white photographs of coal miners. He befriended a fellow photographer, a miner named Danny Brown, and got the use of Brown’s home studio near the mine for several days late in 2019.

And like a local politician, he knocked on proverbial doors, inviting miners to come in and sit for a conversation and photo.

Miner Greg Lafferty Dennis Welsh

The project turned out successful, but was fraught from the outset by what Welsh understood as the miners’ jaundiced view of a stranger from New England intruding on their lives and livelihoods in a suspicious manner. He got turned down in Kentucky and Pennsylvania. The miners and the companies they worked for were skeptical. “They have been on the receiving end of such criticisms these last few years. They inferred I was coming in to cast aspersions or take advantage of them,” Welsh said.

In fact, he was interested in celebrating what he calls “the American worker” and “real people who do real things.”

Eventually, someone responded with a lead, one thing led to another and Welsh connected with Brown in West Virginia. A photographer himself, Brown was eager to help. He was impressed with Welsh’s resume, and figured he could benefit from spending time talking shop with a pro. About a decade ago, Brown tore down the garage beside his house and built a 16-by-16-foot building that he turned first into a gun shop and later into the home for his budding photography business. “I figured I could make more money and not have to be there all the time by just turning it into my studio,” he said.

Brown wasn’t skeptical of Welsh at all. Rather, he was impressed someone with Welsh’s credentials was interested in miners from Cyclone, and talked up the photographer’s visit in advance, trying to recruit people for Welsh to meet and photograph. “For Dennis to spend his money to come down here to show us coal miners from West Virginia what we look like and give us some pretty nice pictures is really nice,” Brown said.

Things got off to a slow start. The first day Welsh set up in Brown’s studio, only one guy showed up. The next, a few more. Brown felt bad Welsh had come all the way from Maine and few people responded. “People were very hesitant,” Brown said. “Coal miners are men, and men, they don’t like their picture taken. They don’t like posing or smiling, for the most part.”

On day three, Brown went to the mine himself, snapped a few photos of miners he knew coming out of work and posted them to social media, to give people an idea of what he and his new friend from Maine were up to. When Brown posted the photos of the miners on social media, people responded. “Once their wives and girlfriends saw them, there was a lot of, ‘You have to get your picture taken.’ ”

By week’s end, Welsh had about 50 portraits.

Even the local TV news showed up to do a story about Welsh.

“They got jazzed about it when they realized they were getting recognition and respect that nobody gives them,” Welsh said. “America was made on coal and steel – and shipbuilding and logging. All those industries, they built the backbone of the United States. We won the war thanks to coal and steel.”

Welsh grew up in Pennsylvania and was familiar with the work ethic of miners. His grandfather worked in the steel industry in Philadelphia, and the backs of many laborers were broken shoveling coal into the red-hot furnaces of the steel mills. He talked to the guys – the miners were all men – about shared common themes, and earned their trust so they would relax and pause long enough to sit for a photo, and maybe even smile.

Miner Donzel Grimmett Dennis Welsh

When Welsh listened, he heard from people who said their voices were not being heard in the larger conversation about the environment and energy policy and who feared their lives were being overlooked and undervalued, and their culture at risk of being erased. “I wanted to put a face on those miners, who have done the work they have done for 200 years without any kind of fanfare. I wanted to give them the due they deserved.”

Larry Vine, former creative director at the Garrand advertising agency in Portland, said he hired Welsh for sensitive campaigns, because he related to people easily and worked hard to get photo and video shoots just right. The photos of the miners from West Virginia are an example of Welsh’s ability to capture the emotions below the surface of a person’s expression, Vine said.

“When I look into the faces of miners, I see deeply behind their eyes. I see not just the dirt and coal dust they’re blanketed in, I can see their heritage, their families, their fathers, their grandfathers, their hopes, dreams and disappointments,” Vine said. “The focus is on revealing the beauty and honesty in the subject, not the propping or the environment. Dennis provides a level of comfort to the subject that allows them to reveal their inner selves.”

The photographs portray the men as they are – drained after work, caked in coal and dust, with rough hands, tired eyes and dirty clothes and gear. For now, they are on view on his website, and Welsh is working to arrange both a gallery exhibition and perhaps a book – though his motives in going to West Virginia were simply to live and learn, and part of an ongoing personal odyssey to expand his horizons by committing to one project each year beyond his work assignments.

He’s done projects in Cuba, Portugal and Iceland, and shot old-time motocross riders in Louisiana, a barbecue joint in Brooklyn and now coal miners in West Virginia.

He’s still not sold on the idea of clean coal, but he feels better understanding and knowing something about the guys who are working to extract it. And he completely buys into the idea that the biggest problem plaguing the country right now is our inability to listen with open minds. “You have to think about where other people are coming from and what their life experiences are, and then you can work on solutions together,” he said. “No matter how you feel about coal, you have to respect those who work in the industry.”

Based on what he learned while he was in West Virginia, Welsh figures there are 200 years of coal left in the mountains. He hopes the men he now calls his friends don’t have to risk their lives to take it out. “I hope we get to a better place energy-wise in this country and that these guys are part of it. If they want to stay in the energy industry, get them moved over to wind, solar or other renewables,” he said.

That’s his opinion. His friends in West Virginia feel otherwise. Brown, the miner who hosted Welsh, worked as an electrician on a submarine while serving in the Navy. He’s a licensed contractor and a gunsmith. He has choices. He chooses to work in the mines, he says, because “it’s a good living. You make a lot of money.”

Miner Rodney “Rolo” Lusk Photo by Dennis Welsh