A Coal Miner’s Eulogy: A History of the Taiwanese Coal Industry’s Struggles began decades ago as an entry to photography contests, but evolved to become a project to tell the story of the nation’s working class, photographer Chu Chien-hsuan (朱健炫) said.
The photographic essay, published in January, is made up of 160 black-and-white photographs of coal miners taken between 1983 and 1988, with short paragraphs explaining their context, Chu said.
Taiwan’s last coal mine, in Sansia (三峽) in what was then Taipei County, closed in 2001.
Photo: CNA
The inspiration to document the nation’s coal industry and the people who worked in it came from a photograph that he had seen when he was a child, Chu said.
“It was shocking for a city boy like me to see an image for the first time of a miner covered in black soot from head to toe,” he said.
Two magazines, US-based Life and Taiwan’s Human, were also major influences on his interest in photography, he said.
Thinking judges would be hooked by images that tell a human story, he made regular trips to coal mines during his time off from work and carefully cultivated relationships with miners, he said.
It was important to build a personal connection and trust because a photographer should ideally be invisible to the picture’s subjects, he said.
The mines he visited ranged from Taipei County’s Tucheng (土城), Pingsi (平溪) and Rueifang (瑞, as well as Jianshi (尖石) in Hsinchu County, a project he continued until 1991, he said.
However, his motivation gradually changed from winning photography prizes to giving voice to the nation’s miners, Chu said.
“The deeper I got into it, the more I felt about the tragedy of miner families. I saw many families where the children had to raise themselves, because they lost their fathers in mining accidents,” he said.
His photographs reveal aspects about coal mining that were often overlooked, such as the industry’s reliance on women for most of the work done outside of the mineshafts, he said.
“Women marshaled the mine carts, sorted out different grades of coal, operated the unloading platforms and disposed of waste rock,” he said.
Many people have also forgotten that the mines frequently employed Amis Aborigines as migrant workers and his camera captured many images of their wives and children, who traveled with them, he said.
Photographing coal miners was an experience in sadness and sympathy, he said, pointing to the cover image of his book, a soot-covered miner looking over his shoulders at the camera with a big grin.
“On his face, you see the miner’s grit and hardship. There was a saying that when a miner was down in the shaft, his life belonged to the earth gods. Only when he came out of the shaft was his life truly his own,” Chu said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching