In the many years Stacy Krantiz has been documenting life in Appalachia—as seen in her ongoing project, As it was Give(n) to Me—she has deftly navigated the minefield that comes with photographing in this often misrepresented part of the county. At least since Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the 1941 book by writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans* that chronicled the lives of poverty-stricken sharecroppers in the South, residents have rightfully complained about how outsiders have portrayed them in photographs—nothing short of a kind of visual openmouthed gawking and pointing. By living with her subjects, Krantiz challenges and plays with common stereotypes of the beautiful hill region of southern Ohio, West Virginia, and eastern Kentucky. Kranitz’s photos show her living it up with the subjects of her photos, deeply embedded, fully embraced, sometimes even appearing in the images herself. She photographs as a member of the family, showing the good and the beautiful, along with the bad and the ugly. Nothing to hide.

Drawing on these sensibilities, Kranitz shot in and around Mingo County, West Virginia, for Mother Jones, to provide a sense of what life is really like in Don Blankenship’s backyard.

Mingo High cheerleaders

Cheerleaders prepare before the first football game of the season at Mingo Central High School, home of the Miners.
Mountain top removal mining

A former Massey-run mountaintop removal mining site in West Virginia. The tiny patch of grass at the top of the mountain is a cemetery to which families have fought to have regular, safe access. Stacy Kranitz/SouthWings
Tommy Blankenship campaign sign

A poster for R. T. “Tommy” Blankenship, candidate for the Knox District Member School Board in Buchanan County, Virginia
mural depicting miners

Part of a new mural in downtown Matewan, West Virginia, depicting life in the coal mines

Vernon Haltom of Coal River Mountain watch, photographed at the Kayford Mountain strip mine, once operated by Massey Energy
Diptych of cheerleaders and marching band

Left: Mingo Central High School cheerleaders and marching band. Right: Alpha Resources, the company that absorbed Massey Energy, donated the land for the new school on top of an old surface mining site.
Diptych of marching band and football players

Left: Mingo Central High School marching band and football team. Right: Mingo Central High replaced Don Blankenship’s old high school in Matewan, which was closed due to a declining population.
upper branch mine disaster memorial

A memorial for the 29 miners killed in the Upper Big Branch mine disaster
Union leaders sitting in front of union building

Former Massey employees and active UMWA 1440 union members Butch Collins (left) and Charles “Hawkeye” Dixon. They are sitting outside the union hall in downtown Matewan.
People hanging out

“These guys are sitting maybe 500 feet from where the gas station/beer store run by Blankenship’s mother used to be. His brother lives in a home right across the street from the old store and in sight from this hangout spot. The town of DeLorme is super tiny and these guys just hang out and drink in this same spot everyday. Just 50 feet away are the train tracks with coal trains running by and 10 feet behind them is the Tug Fork River that marks the border of Kentucky. They all grew up going to the Blankenship’s store and everyone in town knows his brother. They say he is a nice guy.” –Stacy Kranitz
A store in Racine, West Virginia, in Boone county, sells reflective clothing for miners along with t-shirts, flags and items.

A store in Racine, West Virginia, in Boone county, sells reflective clothing for miners along with t-shirts, flags, stickers, and other items.

portrait of Wilma Lee Steele who works at the Mine Wars Museum.

A portrait of Wilma Lee Steele, a board member of the Mine Wars Museum in Matewan

After church in Matewan, West Virginia

After church in Matewan, West Virginia

Boy being baptised in river.

A river baptism on the border of Kentucky and Virginia. The church that performed the baptism is located in Stopover, Kentucky, where Blankenship was born.

A grocery store called Family Foods in Freeborn, Kentucky, just down the road from the gas station Blankenship’s mother ran in Delorme. The owners told Kranitz that they are not likely to be able to keep the family-run business open after the latest round of coal company bankruptcies, buyouts, and layoffs. They plan to close around the New Year. The next closest grocery store is almost an hour away.

Woman painting mural

Ellen Hatfield and Vera Hankins work on a mural depicting coal miners in an underground mine. The mural is part of the “Turn This Town Around” grant that also supported the Mine Wars museum. It is across the street from the union in downtown Matewan.

Tattoo of West Virginia

Jacob Knabb shows off his tattoo of West Virginia, with an X marking Boone county, a historic coal county with many former Massey workers. His father and grandfather worked in coal. His father was recently laid off. Jacob left West Virginia after college and now lives in Chicago.

Portraits of four miners

Underground shift workers from a dog mine near Feds Creek, Kentucky. Dog mines are independent and small operations nestled between the big corporate mines.

man wearing "coal blooded" shirt

A man in downtown Madison, West Virginia, in Boone County

Men standing in cage overlooking mine

Men at an overlook in Pikeville, Kentucky, staring at the cut-through project, one of the largest civil-engineering projects in the western hemisphere, constructed from 1973 to 1987. Nearly 18 million cubic yards of earth were removed from the Peach Orchard Mountain, rerouting a fork of the Big Sandy River as well as rail lines and the highway. The cut-through project was initiated to relocate the railroad and eliminate the coal dust in the community.

*An earlier version of this piece misspelled Walker Evans’ name as Walter.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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