This is a vintage and striking portrait of pony driver, John Street in a West Virginia coal mine in 1969 taken by Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, Eddie Adams. This particular image is clearly an editor’s crop of the Associated Press wire photo (transmission ref - APHS157847), and the print is stamped with March 31st, 1969. Just 112 days before Neil Armstrong would set foot on the moon.

In HALLE13’s Groundbreaking this image appears alongside Photograph of the Earth taken from the Apollo 11 spacecraft during its translunar insertion. (NASA image ref- AS11-36-5355) The spacecraft was 98,000 nautical miles from Earth when the photograph was made. The Apollo 11 image was also distributed by the Associated press and taken from the Houston Chronicle archives. The contrast between the intense proximity captured by Adams in the dirty Coal Mines of West Virgina and the majesty of the Earth when pictured at 180,000 kilometers, between Street and Armstrong, between the advanced technology of the moon landing and the hard labour of the coal mine could not be more striking.

One image is a largely conceptual groundbreaking – the practical act of going to the moon served no direct purpose. The other is the dirty, unsexy, reality of practical groundbreaking required to generate the fossil which literally powered the great late 20th century American/Global fantasy of unrelenting economic progress and growth without any externality. By the mid-20th century, coal had become the leading fuel for generating electricity in the US. Today, despite the climate crisis, it still accounts for 20% of all energy use in the United States.

This image was taken the year after Adams took his infamous image of South Vietnamese national police chief Brig General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executes a Viet Cong officer with a single pistol shot in the head in Saigon, February 1968. While Adams covered 13 wars in his career this quite portrait of a despondent John Street and his Pony, taken in the heart of America, implicitly asks the question – what are we doing all this for?

The typical response of ‘why-not’ doesn’t seem to hold up. The carnage of Vietnam, the trip to the moon, the suffering in the mines. You can’t help but look upon Adam’s probing image of unmitigated suffering and feel yourself asking that ultimate, and uncomfortably unanswerable, why.