I'm Rereading

I'm rereading Slow Burn: A Photodocument of Centralia, Pennsylvania (University of Pennsylvania, 1986) .

I can't recommend this book highly enough.

Copies can still be found on Amazon, ABE and other online bookselling sites.

Jacobs took an interesting approach to her subject. She lived in Centralia for some time as an embedded artist and journalist. She came when there was still very much a town to speak of. Many had already fled this small town in the Pennsylvania coal country by 1983, the year Jacobs arrived, driven out by the hellish gases that emanated from the mine fire that burned below and threatened to engulf the town with the various sinkholes and subsidences that had resulted from the inferno under everyone's feet. Centralia has since utterly vanished with the exception of a very few buildings. There is no more town. What were streets are overgrown with trees, hard to even discern. Possibly the form of what was once a town can be seen from the air on a fly-over. Even the zip code was revoked by the government. This town (and a neighboring small town) were given the Sodom and Gomorrah treatment. But most of the destruction came in the form of bulldozing, which was done by the United States government. The mine fire itself did not get the opportunity to physically devour the town. Ironically, the air quality in Centralia today is reportedly better than that of Pennsylvania's capital, Harrisburg.

Jacobs was such a good set of ears, such a good listener, as well as a great set of eyes. She uses many quotes by citizens of the beset town as she follows them in their tribulations and in their reckoning of the political process in which they are all forced to participate. There is initially a big division between those who want to stay, to claim the land of their ancestors, and those who are willing to leave. We now know how this ended, how the choice was taken away from these citizens. Jacobs' photographs are often stunningly well constructed, even as they go about their business of stark witnessing. The poetry and narrative qualities of these images are never at odds. They are felicitously joined in Jacobs' art. Often, these images are quite tender. Many of them are unearthly, as Centralia in that period often did look like the surface of some alien planet or some quarter of the Underworld. These photographs are of much more than archival value.

The (then) young Centralia resident pictured here is Todd Domboski. He is the teenager who fell into a hole in the earth that opened up below his feet as he was walking through his grandmother's backyard. He was very lucky to be pulled out, narrowly escaped death, as the hole was determined to be several hundred feet deep and filled with carbon monoxide. Just now I confused him with the citizen who made a valiant stand to keep the town going long after everyone had vacated it, following government orders. Actually that civil disobedient  who remained so long was John Lokitis Jr.  He held out until 2009. If you search his name on YouTube or Google him, you should find the same really interesting documentary I found some time back.

Postscript: I see this book came out in a new edition in 2010.  I hope Photo-Eye Blog will not mind my sharing these two photos they snapped of the new edition of Jacobs' book.