This 64-page book contains 50 images from this award winning and internationally exhibited 15-year project. It also contains several essays and interviews with miners and their families by my writing partner Charlie Angus. This book is available at most of your favourite book retailers.
Published by Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Oregon as part of the Critical Mass Award.
"These images relate to a photographic tradition pioneered by Leslie Sheddon in Nova Scotia, Russell Lee in West Virginia, Bill Brandt in Wales, and Sebastiao Salgado in his more recent images of South American miners. Palu's mining project also has strong links with Steve McQueen's video Western Deep, shot in a South African gold mine."
Bill Jefferies, Director Simon Fraser University Art Gallery.
From 2006 exhibition at SFU
"Photography transforms the mundane facts of labor in Cage Call: Life and Death in the Hard Rock Mining Belt, a classic black and white study of the mines of northern Canada by journalist Louie Palu. What in actuality are loud, foul and chaotic places are made mythic and contemplative by the isolation and silence of the images. Palu's workers are both tragic and heroic; the world they inhabit is dark and dangerous but it is also beautiful and compelling. In Shaft Miner at the 2500 Foot Level Station Before Drilling, Louvicourt Mine, Val d'Or, Quebec, we see a solitary figure from behind, bathed in light from above, hands raised in a an empathetic yet ambiguous gesture, that, removed from it's context, could be an act of worship. Another image shows the men of the day shift, Kerr Mine No. 3 Shaft entering the cage that will carry them below the earth. They are shot from above; we see the face of only the last man in the line, who looks up, letting light fall across his startlingly young face. The messy din of the Falconbridge Smelter is stayed so that we may see it. The shaft of light that fills the distant corners of this immense space makes its hellish nature all the more evident. Palu has found, recorded, and created an entire world that most of us will not experience except through his mediation, and he has revealed it as both horrific and full of wonder."
Alison Devine Nordstrom, Ph.D., Curator of Photographs
George Eastman House International Museum of Film and Photography
Curator's Statement, Vital Signs Exhibition Catalogue 2005