Mining Materials: A Conversation with Louie Palu

In 1991, Louie Palu, a newly minted graduate of the Ontario College of Art, was looking for a photo project. Palu’s father, a stone mason, encouraged him to think about labour. A child of Italian immigrants who spoke little English, Palu was acutely aware of the labour exploitation that underpins society. This brought him to Kirkland Lake, Ontario, one of the richest gold mining regions in the world. The wealth extracted from Kirkland Lake, however, was rarely reinvested in the communities’ infrastructures or in workers’ wages. Underground, miners were at risk of accidents and industrial disease. Contaminants from the mine also impacted the health of people living in proximity to the mines. The gross inequities Palu witnessed sparked an interest in mining and resulted in the most comprehensive documentation of mining in Canadian photo history.

Over the next twelve years, Palu visited eighteen operating and over fifty closed mines in towns across Ontario and Quebec such as Timmins, Sudbury, and Cobalt. His portrait of mining communities was broad, ranging from underground labour, to architecture, to union organizing and strikes, to funerals and images of accident victims, to community and belonging. In 2023 the work was exhibited at The Image Centre as Louie Palu: Cage Call. 

At the core of Palu’s series is the reality that labour builds our world, and that everything, including photography, comes from the mine. Throughout the twentieth century, over 20% of the silver mined worldwide was used in photography. Metals like gold, mercury, platinum, and uranium have been used in photographic practices, and today, smartphones and digital technologies use more minerals than ever: our “dematerialized, networked” world is powered by nickel, copper, and rare earth elements. The material reliance of photography—and the artworld—on mining is often overlooked. Palu’s body of work is a corrective to this blind spot in photography and all camera-based image-making.

Photography and labour have a vexed relationship. William Henry Fox Talbot’s origin story of photography, for instance, celebrated “the agency of Light alone,” shifting focus from the labour and materials necessary to produce the print, to the autogenic power of the sun.¹ This promise of transcending the limits and costs of matter runs through photographic discourse, underplaying the labour of photography and often avoiding labour histories as subjects. As the artist Harun Farocki summarizes, film and photography seem to be “repelled by” the factory and labour.² We see a repetition of the same patterns in the hype about AI, which has become a new frontier of labour-less fantasies, though the technology remains labour- and resource-intensive. Consider the recent reports that an AI-powered fast food drive-thru was, in reality, workers in the Philippines. 

Why we want to erase labour is a more complicated question. Palu uncompromisingly brings these histories into view. His photographs insist on bearing witness.

Siobhan Angus (SA): The title of your series refers to the cage: the elevator that takes the miner underground. Cage Call marks the start of the shift. What brought you to making these images of miners and mining? 

Louie Palu (LP): Before I became an image-maker, my first significant moment of illumination was connecting my childhood to my parents’ history, their trauma from war and immigrating to Canada. Upon arrival in Canada, they were dispatched to employment related to industrial production and were abused in those jobs. My entire neighborhood shared that story, and when I went to the mining communities in Northern Ontario and Quebec, that narrative was multiplied by a hundred.

It was in Sudbury, Ontario where I had a grand awakening. I spent years learning about the complex and tragic experiences of miners, beyond reading about them in books or hearing about them in lectures. Being physically present is important: the project required me to be in the mines, breathing what workers were breathing, being on picket lines, and visiting workers dying of diseases they got on the job. 

SA: How did you convince mining companies to let you go underground and, in turn, how did you build trust within the community? 

LP: Getting access to an underground mine is like getting access to a space mission: you have the company give it to you, there really is no sneaking in. Also, you could be seriously hurt or killed. The first access that resulted in nearly the entire body of work for Cage Call came through a geologist at the Kerr Addison Mine in Virginiatown, Ontario, named Frank Ploeger. He convinced the mine owners that making a record for history and making art was important, so they let me go underground. I was there so much the company offered me a job working underground as a miner. I thought about it but declined. It was pretty much unrestricted access. 

SA: Fascinating! Did you run into any resistance?

LP: For mines that would not give me access (like the Macassa Mine), I used a strategy where I partnered with the local museum. That opened doors. For some operations it was a different story, especially the mines with a long history of labour conflict. The only way I could get into those mines was by repeated phoning, which maybe gave me a day underground or at the smelter, which is not much, but I got good material sometimes. Collaborating with unions like the United Steelworkers, Mine Mill, and Smelter Workers Union helped. Sometimes I did corporate work for the company to build trust. None of the work I did for the companies ever ended up in my documentary work, but I was trying to show them not to be afraid of what I was doing. 

At the Stanleigh Mine, a uranium mine in Elliot Lake, Ontario, the union wrote me into an agreement with the company, which gave me access underground. I was excited that the union valued photography for what it could do to make visible what they did and where.

The hardest access of all was to injured workers, but once the union felt like I was genuine and not a spy for the company, the doors opened up. There were some mines I never got access to. The greatest moments were having exhibitions for the miners in their towns. They would show their families where they worked, and it was great.

SA: It’s interesting that framing the project as historical helped you gain access. Contemporary discourse often frames mining as a historical form of labour, even as technology is incredibly reliant on mineral extraction. Now there is more mining than ever.

LP: When I looked at archival images of mining where I was taking photographs, I thought I had missed the key time to have been documenting what was unfolding. But I was so wrong. There is a unique aspect to photography that involves time, and thirty years later my photographs are teaching me that every era is important in its own way—you only need the imagination and political awareness to see it unfolding in front of you. 

In Sudbury, my images of injured workers in a 2012 exhibition were described as “historical” by mining officials, who tried to downplay or discredit my work as out-of-date in order to deflect conversation about people being hurt and killed on the job in mines. In 2013 a mining company in Sudbury was fined more than one million dollars in connection with a double fatality in which miners were buried alive.

SA: This brings to mind Gordon Parks’ description of the camera as a weapon against injustice and the long tradition of activist documentary photography.

LP: For a long time there were many photojournalism-related individuals who told me I was an artist and not a journalist. Then there were people from the art world who claimed documentary photography was not art; it was journalism. Allan Sekula’s ideas and work helped advance where I was trying to get when I was younger and could not find the words to explain. I am fine with this debate about what my work is or is not, as long as I get to question, record, and monitor power structures.

I like to think of modes and strategies of disruption, counter-narrative, community engagement, and empowering workers. However, in the digital age that we are in now, we must create new strategies to prepare for new threats. 

SA: Visually, the black and white photographs draw a connection between the past and present—they evoke social documentary. But mining photography is technically complicated—mines are dark, damp, and dusty. If you used colour film, it would be technically complicated—and expensive. Were the formal choices you made intentional or a necessity? 

LP: In the pre-digital times, the need for a lab to process colour film and make prints literally made any work in colour completely cost-prohibitive. Black and white work was DIY, down to mixing the chemistry. Additionally, the mine is literally a workplace in complete darkness where you can be breathing in diesel fumes or get blown up, crushed, or worse. At first, I made many portraits which meant that the miners would have to hold still so no one got hurt because their workplace was in complete darkness. I used a flashlight to check the position of everything before using my camera flash to make the photograph, because there are open holes you can fall down in and die or be crushed by falling rock from moving around. I really wish I knew what I know now when I started this project in 1991. I have so many ideas, expanded skills, approaches, and tools. I would love to do new work in the mines.

SA: There is a poignant aspect to portraits documenting workers’ labour using the materials they extract, such as silver and gold.

LP: I began looking at portraits on metal (like coins) very differently. I questioned why the Queen is on our money and not these workers. Sitting on a pile of blasted rock, wet, breathing in oil and diesel fumes, and drills blaring at hundreds of decibels, I felt like it was time for the Royal Family to go.

SA: As a society, we owe a lot to mining—certainly more than we owe the Royal Family. Mining quite literally builds our world. What did mining communities teach you? 

LP: Over the course of my life, I have had a series of consciousness shifts. Whether it is physical or economic, violence is how workers are controlled, and I learned that photography can interrupt or become a seed to inspire resistance against systems of control. 

I’ve learned from union leaders and activists that resistance and disruption can improve people’s lives within capitalism, and there are wins even if capitalism isn’t defeated or replaced with a system based on greater equality. The struggles we believe in are eternal, and every “win” is temporary, but they are most resilient when they are supported by like-minded communities. 

SA: Mining unions have been on the forefront of workers’ rights, and the protections we now have owe a lot to labour militancy in mining communities. Your work celebrates the agency of workers. One of my favourite photos from the series is the Scab Hunter shirt on a picket line—it’s unapologetically militant. 

LP: I have spent time on a lot of picket lines and with a lot of union organizers. Some of the biggest labour fights in Canada came from workers at mines. Some were victories, some losses, some never-ending. The 1941 strike in Kirkland Lake was significant, as were battles in Cobalt, Timmins, Rouyn-Noranda, the asbestos strike in Quebec, and especially Sudbury as ground zero for union battles. Canada has a labour history where bombings, the use of firearms, and street fights were normal. The bombing at the Giant Mine in Yellowknife which killed nine miners was a shocking moment. 

SA: Those violent histories have shaped union movements in Canada. Currently, organized labour is experiencing a resurgence. Any lessons that might be relevant for the present?

LP: There are two narrative lines occurring at the same time. One has organized labour rising mostly in the service industry, but companies have also learned from this history, and so union busting is also advancing.

SA: Environmental justice is also an important theme. 

LP: I have worked in nearly every part of Canada’s wilderness. I love trees, birds, and I ride horses; they have changed my life. I like the extreme cold; I feel best when the weather makes me uncomfortable. Knowing the winter is in decline due to climate change disappoints and angers me, which is why I started working in the Arctic more intensely over the past ten years. The Arctic is disproportionately affected by climate change and nearly half of our country is in the sub and high Arctic. I am seeing a lot of powerful energy in artists and activists engaging with environmental justice, and we must all reckon with whatever our complicity is in Canada’s resource extraction industries. We need to aim our efforts at the right targets for the smartest effect. Which brings me back to mining. Everything we make is possible because of a mine worker.

SA: Something I’ve noticed is that artists are now talking more about labour and framing themselves as artworkers. At the same time, there has traditionally been a perceived antipathy of the art world to many forms of labour, especially working-class labor. Do you think this is shifting?

LP: I remember when I was getting my MFA, I looked out the window of my studio and there was a massive garbage bin full of the end-of-year’s discarded art-making materials. Wood, canvas, metal, cement, plaster, wire, and every other contemporary creative material. That’s the mining, logging, and industrial production we need to acknowledge. It affirmed my long-held feelings about nearly everything coming from mines and workers. I have never really thought of myself as a worker. I just never considered it until you asked this question. 

Two things make the type of workers I photographed on this project distinct. The first is that over three thousand workers have been killed on the job in the province of Ontario since mining began over a hundred years ago. Also, the kinds of strikes they have had are in their own league—where companies have hired paramilitary security companies to deal with their workers. I just don’t think I can think of myself on the same level as a worker. Imagine that thousands more mine-workers died as a result of industrial disease. It’s staggering to think of what it costs to get something made into the phones that are in our pockets. Are artists “workers”? I guess so, but I think it’s different than working on an assembly line in a factory. No one who works in a mine has a solo exhibition.

SA: What are your thoughts on the future direction of photography in relation to labour?

LP: I recently was invited by Dr. Dona Schwartz at the University of Calgary to do some studio visits and crits with her graduate students. I was pleased to see everyone engaging with social political issues and considering the materiality of the objects they created. One student had some portraits of immigrants working at Walmart, where he had also worked.

Recently, I have been exploring state security apparatuses and surveillance in my work. Organizations such as Forensic Architecture and the video of the murder of George Floyd are examples of how realism has impact and works as evidence.

SA: In a moment of widespread surveillance and excessive documentation, many histories still remain out of view.

LP: In 2020, after documenting a night of rioting related to the murder of George Floyd in front of the White House, I waited until all the protesters had left. Late into the night, city workers rolled up to clean up the streets littered with water bottles and much more, including destruction caused by the police and protesters, and it struck me how this activity is related to protests but is almost never acknowledged. Nearly everything we have is made by or cleaned by workers, and being present can help us build stronger ways of thinking and countering harmful forces.

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Siobhan Angus is an assistant professor of media studies at Carleton University. She is the author of Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography, (Duke University Press 2024) and her research has been published in Environmental Humanities, Capitalism and the Camera (Verso, 2021) and October.

Luigino (Louie) Palu is a photographer and filmmaker whose work has examined social political issues, such as climate change, human rights, and conflict for 30 years. Louie’s projects have been selected for a Guggenheim Fellowship and World Press Photo Awards. His work has appeared in National Geographic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Figaro, and El Pais. His work has been exhibited in galleries, museums and screened at festivals worldwide and is held in numerous collections including the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and National Gallery of Art.

1. This phrase was included in a “Notice to the Reader” accompanying William Henry Fox Talbot’s collection of prints, The Pencil of Nature (1844-1846).
2. Harun Farocki, “Workers Leaving the Factory,” translated by Laurent Faasch-Ibrahim, Senses of Cinema, July 21, 2002, https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2002/harun-farocki/farocki_workers.

This article is published in issue 41.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue