photo exhibition

Coal Story

There’s a real sense of history in Darek Fortas's Coal Story, which explores the lives of miners in Poland's heavily industrialized Silesia region from the 60s to the present. The most striking image in the show is of the miner’s changing room, an ominously empty space with its ceiling covered in a thicket of clothes and boots hoisted on chains off the floor. This purely functional space takes on a haunting weight that’s evocative of the years of struggle these men underwent in the Communist era. This sense of strain appears in his other pictures too, simple, striking shots of items ravaged by use, or the portraits of the miners, their faces coated in soot and grime. The artist’s own colour work is complemented by an incredible array of black and white archive photos scattered across a table for visitors to examine. / Conor McDevitt