Via Coal Geology:

“Southern Illinois Coal: A Portfolio” contains coal mining photographs by C. William Horrell, taken across the southern Illinois Coal Belt over a twenty-year period from 1966 to 1986. … “In cool documentary style, Horrell’s photos detail the miners, the methods, and the artifacts of Illinois coal. From giant sur­face shovels to self propelled underground extractors, processing equipment, and abandoned mines, Horrell covered the coal fields.”—St. Louis Post Dispatch.

Horrell’s photographs, reproduced in fine duotone lithography, capture the varied phenomena of twentieth-century coal mining technology: the awesome scale of surface mining machines and their impact on the land; massive machines forced into narrow passageways with inches to spare as they carry coal from the face to conveyer belts; and, more significantly, the advent of continuous miners, machines that dominated underground or “deep” mines during the mid-1960s….