David Breashears couldn’t be reached a number of days ago when we’d hoped to speak over the phone. He was in Kathmandu, dealing with something of a mountaineering crisis.
This wasn’t unusual for Mr. Breashears, who has been scaling mountains since the early 1980s. When I last spoke to him, we had discussed “Rivers of Ice: Vanishing Glaciers of the Greater Himalaya,” a series of large-scale photographs exhibited at Asia Society in Manhattan. The exhibition contrasted archival photos from early 20th-century explorers with images of the same scenes by Mr. Breashears and his GlacierWorks team.
This spring, he returned to the Main Rongbuk Glacier, at Mount Everest’s base, to install a photo “gallery” more than 17,000 feet above sea level. An online video shows him tromping gingerly across the ice with a large print in hand.
The prints he and his team hammered into the ice do not show mountains or glaciers. They are photos about coal, shot by other photographers. They comprise half of “Coal + Ice,” a major exhibition produced by Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations that opened last year at Beijing’s Three Shadows Photography Art Center. It was a huge show that tried to show the fossil fuel industry’s complicated path: from the glaciers of the Greater Himalaya to scenes deep within mines.
It also includes photos about coal from the United States, Malaysia, the United Kingdom, Russia, Germany and elsewhere. It incorporates some of the classics of mine photography — including work by Robert Capa, Bruce Davidson (Slides 1 and 4) and Lewis Hine (Slide 7), whose photos are perhaps the best example of early documentary imagery used for social change.
But in “Coal + Ice,” much of the emphasis is on the work of Chinese photographers.
“The more I thought about trying to take on the project of photographing coal production and the impact of coal in China, the more I realized the hugeness of that,” said Susan Meiselas, one of the exhibition’s curators.
Instead, she reached out to photographers like Song Chao, 34, who had worked at a coal mine himself in Shandong Province, in eastern China.
“I could not say it was a sweet and pleasing experience,” Mr. Song wrote via e-mail. “Though it was not as tough as some people would expect.”
Mr. Song was not a professional photographer when he began making portraits of co-workers and friends (above). He started shooting for reasons more personal than political.
“I tend to focus more on the individual than the social aspect of the work,” said Mr. Song, who is now working on a series about migrant workers.
“You don’t see in-depth documentary, in the same way,” Ms. Meiselas said of his portraits, “but this is someone who had a classic approach and did terrific work.”
Taken together, the works of the 30 photographers who make up the “coal” part of the exhibition present a wide view of the industry, now and in years past. Ms. Meiselas, a Magnum photographer, originally gathered them for “Mined in China,” an earlier exhibition she curated with Orville Schell, the director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations.
The project had its origins in a trip Mr. Schell and his family took to Shanxi Province in northern China — an area he called “coal country.” It was, he said, “one of the most arresting and tipping-point moments” of all of the years he has spent studying China.
“The landscape was so desecrated, and so bleak,” he said. “There were some villages; there were piles of huge mountains of fly ash; there were piles of coal. You didn’t see the sun.”
And so he teamed up with Ms. Meiselas and started meeting with those who’d been chronicling the coal odyssey in China — “trying to put in a visual narrative form this incredible carbon arc that was affecting billions of people,” he said.
“Mined in China” opened in Houston in 2008 and later became part of “Coal + Ice,” which also includes photographs of the Asian rivers that flow down from the Tibetan Plateau. When it opened at Three Shadows, the organizers were planning to take the exhibition to New York, Berlin and elsewhere, including other parts of China.
Enter Yixian International Photo Festival, which begins Friday in Anhui Province, in the country’s east. The festival will take place at the Yixian Museum of Art and throughout ancestral halls in a rural area known for its historic architecture.
“When it was in Beijing, they just used a very normal exhibition space,” Ou Ning, the festival’s organizer, said of “Coal + Ice.” “But in our festival they have to use the rural architecture. So it’s a huge challenge for them in design.”
This is the festival’s seventh year, but the first that its organizers — the local government — invited a wider range of exhibitors. Mr. Ou, a curator, poet and artist who contributes to Asia Society’s online ChinaFile magazine, was commissioned to organize the festival, which is combined with an independent art event he first organized last year.
Mr. Ou, who is in his early 40s, has been studying China’s urban-rural divide and rural reconstruction, and used that theme in the program for Yixian. It has been advertised on Facebook and Sina Weibo – a popular Chinese microblogging service — and, less conventionally, on large billboards in the countryside.
“You always see the same people — it’s the art community,” he said. “So I want to access more public.”
At Yixian, that means farmers. Peasants. People who might not typically spend their evenings at openings. And people whose lives are affected by glacial melt.
“Its going to be really fascinating to see what ordinary people make of this idea,” Mr. Schell said, “that coal is linked to air, to temperature, to glaciers, to rivers, to hydrology.”
It is hard to say where “Coal + Ice” will go next, after Mr. Breashears’s glacier-top open-air gallery and a relatively small, rural photo festival.
“We’ve been doing it now for five years and it’s sort of like the book that never has the last chapter written,” Mr. Schell said. “It has continued to evolve.”
He continued: “Like it or not, we’re all in this story together, and it’s the climate change story. And the costs are immense for everybody, in terms of how the story ends.”