Instagram story viewer> @therealgrahamb0> Posts

Graham

@therealgrahamb0

757

followers

1054

following

Going strange places, sometimes taking photos

POSTS STORIES REELS TAGGED

Download All

Various 35mm shots from Irpin, Bucha, and Hostomel.

#ukraine #ukrainewar #35mm #leica #leicaiii #irpin #bucha #kyiv #tmax100 @kodakprofessional taken in Kyiv Oblast by @therealgrahamb0

91

1

4 years ago

80 years ago today, 107 prisoners were driven by their Nazi captors from the Buchenwald concentration camp to the edge of the Harz mountains, becoming the first prisoners of a new camp simply called “Dora”.

In the following weeks, they were joined by thousands more, forced to work transforming a vast underground fuel storage depot into a secret factory for the Nazi “Wonder weapon”: the V-2 rocket.

Dora quickly gained notoriety as one of the most brutal concentration camps. Its prisoners, who numbered over 10,000 by Christmas, lived in the dark tunnels; in bunks stacked four tall, they slept in several unfinished tunnel chambers, with dirt floors and without any utilities or sanitary facilities aside from buckets. By the end of December, more than 800 of them had died.

When the first operational V-2 was launched from the Hague one year after the camp's creation, more than 600 rockets were leaving the tunnel factory each month. In October 1944, “Mittelbau-Dora” became its own independent camp complex with sub-camps sprawled out all across the Harz mountains, where over 30,000 inmates had to carve out new tunnel systems for the Nazi aircraft industry and build railway lines.

Besides the 5,000 victims of V-2 terror strikes in London, Antwerp, and Paris, an estimated 10,000 people were murdered building them, the world’s first missiles having killed twice as many people in their production than their operational use. Including the "Mittelbau" sub-camps for new tunnels and death marches in 1945, an estimated 60,000 inmates passed through the Mittelbau-Dora complex, one third of whom did not survive.

These photos come from over a dozen visits into the tunnel systems a number of years ago. Despite multiple attempts to entirely destroy the tunnels after the war, much of the system survived, becoming a protected memorial site shortly after the German reunification. In one chamber, V-2 rocket engines sit in meter deep water, still in neat rows they’d been placed in 1945. In other galleries, factory machines lay idle, with slave laborers’ tools covering the floor and workbenches.

#mittelbaudora #buchenwald #nordhausen #harz #gegendasvergessen taken in Kohnstein by @therealgrahamb0

166

15

3 years ago

Hundreds of feet under the hills of Pennsylvania, in one of the last underground anthracite coal mines in the USA.

Anthracite is the hardest and purest coal, with a shiny, deep black appearance. Unlike bituminous (or "soft") coal, which is mined throughout the country, anthracite is only found in central Pennsylvania.

Lowered into the mine in a dirty steel bucket, going underground is like traveling back in time. The few remaining underground anthracite mines employ the same mining methods that have been used for over a hundred years. Many of the workers are 3rd or 4th generation coal miners, and even most of the equipment and machinery is several generations older than the miners themselves, passed on from mine to mine as each one shut down.

From its peak employment of 180,000 in 1914, today Pennsylvania’s anthracite industry employs less than 1,000 people, and coal production is less than 10% of what it was 100 years ago.

Safety regulations and heavy machinery have led the remaining large coal companies to abandon the deep shafts in favor of surface mining, simply stripping the layers of the earth away to reach the coal veins. As of August 2023, there are only four active underground anthracite mines, each one a small, family-run business. At the end of 2022, just over 30 people were employed in underground anthracite mining, a number which has even further decreased since.

An enormous thanks to the miners for inviting me to photograph such a unique place, and a huge thanks to @gelatinlabs for the excellent developing and scanning as always.

#analog #analogphotography #filmphotography #ilford #ilforddelta #delta3200 #mediumformat #120film #rolleiflex #coalmine #coalmining #anthracite #mining #industry #industrialheritage #pennsylvania #pa #pacoal #pennsylvaniacoal #mineshaft taken in Coal Country by @therealgrahamb0

184

21

3 years ago

Some recent (and a few old) shots from my slowly ongoing documentation of Pennsylvania's anthracite coal industry, shot on medium format film

1: The slogan "Coal Keeps the Lights On" adorns a coal conveyor along the road near Mahanoy City

2: Miners picking at the working face in one of the region's last independent underground mines, hundreds of feet beneath the surface

3. Inside the workshop room of the Superior Coal Company's processing plant; dating back to the 1920s, it is the oldest operating 'breaker' in the region

4. An enormous dragline excavator sits in a 600-foot-deep pit where the hilltop town of Wadesville once stood. The entire town was bought out by the Reading Anthracite Company more than fifty years ago; after it's inhabitants were relocated, the houses were demolished, and it is now one of the region's largest strip mines.

5-7: views of several operating coal breakers in the region, where anthracite is crushed, processed, and sold as heating fuel

8-9: two "bonus" 35mm portraits from several years ago, of miners at a (now defunct) underground slope mine

#analog #analogphotography #filmphotography #ilford #ilforddelta #delta3200 #mediumformat #120film #rolleiflex #coalmine #coalmining #anthracite #mining #industry #industrialheritage #pennsylvania #pa #pacoal #pennsylvaniacoal by @therealgrahamb0

175

12

8 months ago

Defying the ever-changing surface world, underground labyrinths and voids beneath cities and mountains remain as untouched relics of Germany's turbulent twentieth century.

Photos from assorted adventures over the past year into once-secret military installations, industrial sites, and infrastructure projects, including the very bunkers where the Wehrmacht High Command directed the invasion of Poland and the starting line of the Space Race. by @therealgrahamb0

128

10

a year ago

Between Animal Rescue and Air Strikes

Yesterday I had the opportunity to follow a team from @animal.rescue.kharkiv , who evacuate all kinds of animals from Ukraine's front line towns.

As the Russians intensify their bombardment and attacks across eastern Ukraine, more and more animals find themselves abandoned. Made up of Ukrainian and foreign volunteers, the organization uses their wide network to locate the animals for rescue, with requests coming from both civilians and soldiers across Ukraine's front line. In some instances, the owners request their own pet' evacuations, being unable to care for them anymore as the war wages on; in other cases, the owners were forced to flee or have been killed, and the animals left abandoned.

Their van filled with pet carriers, the group left Kharkiv shortly after sunrise, stopping to pick up dogs and cats at destinations all over eastern Ukraine including Lyman, Konstantinivka, and villages outside of Donetsk.

Since the organization's creation, more than 22,000 animals have been rescued; transported to their shelters in Kharkiv, they are relocated or put up for adoption, finding families and homes all over the world. Although cats and dogs make up the vast majority, the organization rescues and cares for animals of all types, from horses to exotic birds.

The volunteers operate under constant danger. As yesterday's crew picked up the last dog for the day in a small town only 15 kilometers from occupied Donetsk, Russian aircraft dropped several guided bombs on the town, destroying houses and wounding several civilians. Many other times, teams have come under artillery bombardments and aerial attacks as they try to take as many animals as they can away from the front lines.

By the time the group had returned to Kharkiv shortly before midnight, we had driven around 800 kilometers, and more than a dozen dogs and two cats were brought to safety and dropped off at the organization's shelters.

#ukraine #warinukraine #ukrainewar #donbas #donbass #kharkiv #war #donetsk #animalrescue #animalshelter #pressphoto taken in Donetsk Oblast by @therealgrahamb0

111

2

2 years ago

1. Mai on the streets of Kreuzberg & Neukölln

#35mm #film #filmphotography #analog #ektachrome #e100 #leica #leicaiii #1mai #mayday #may1st #berlin #kreuzberg #neukölln taken in Berlin - Kreuzberg by @therealgrahamb0

51

1

2 years ago

Landscapes of the Anthracite

1: A wooden "Breaker", or coal processing plant. Though this one is a replica built for the 1970 Hollywood movie "The Molly Maguires", hundreds of these tall wooden structures silhouetted the landscape during the first half of the twentieth century, almost all of them since having been demolished.

2&3: Several miles away, an active modern breaker, part of Atlantic Carbon's operations near Hazleton. The coal mined from their open-pit is crushed into different sizes to be sold for different heating types; "Chestnut" and "Pea Coal" being the largest, and "Barley" the finest.

4: A rickety ancient breaker, run by Superior Coal Prep., co. in Hegins, and the oldest surviving one in the region.

5: Only a few houses are still inhabited in Heckschersville, as surface mining encroaches on the village. The road, which once continued to a neighborhood farther up the mountain, now dead-ends in a coal pit after the houses were bought out by a large mining company. Today, the hillside is gone, and a hundred foot deep pit cuts into the earth where houses stood only several years ago.

6: Once proclaimed as the world's largest man-made mountain, the giant coal waste pile towers over the neighborhood of Tharptown, just outside of Shamokin.

7&8. Scenes from Shamokin. The steeples of the St. Edward's Catholic Church and the neighboring Ukrainian Catholic church rise above the warehouses and workers' houses. From the hilltop cemetery in the middle of the town, crowded streets adorn the valley surrounded by mountains and coal waste piles.

9. One of countless abandoned and decaying coal companies in the region, the name "Split Vein Coal Co." faintly legible on the faded roadside sign.

#analog #analogphotography #filmphotography #ilford #ilforddelta #delta3200 #mediumformat #120film #rolleiflex #coalmine #coalmining #industry #industrial #landscape #anthracite #mining #industrialheritage #pennsylvania #pa taken in Coal Country by @therealgrahamb0

90

7

2 years ago

A safety lamp lit expedition through an abandoned coal mine

#analog #analogphotography #film #filmphotography #120film #mediumformat #mediumformatfilm #rolleiflex #kodak #portra #portra800 #abandonedmine taken in Coal Country by @therealgrahamb0

112

7

3 years ago

The situations I get myself into...

Medium format photos of a friend taking large format photos atop a bridge, hundreds of feet over the Hudson

#analog #film #mamiya #mamiyac220 #portra #portra800 #analogphotography #filmphotography #6x6 #mediumformat #120 #120film by @therealgrahamb0

95

7

3 years ago

Another post from Pennsylvania's coal fields. Tucked away in the woods in the Appalachian mountains, these were taken in one of only three underground anthracite mines left, and the second that I’ve photographed.

From a skeletal headframe structure on the hillside, the miners are lowered 100 feet down below the surface, riding in the coal bucket to the mine’s first and only level; this is one of the youngest mines in the region, having only operated for several years so far.

Anthracite deposits are particularly uneven, resembling waves among the layers of rock. Mining is done the same way it was 100 years ago: an inclined slope is dug downwards from the surface, from which a tunnel branches off of, called a “Gangway”. Following horizontally along the coal vein, the miners work their way upwards from the gangway, chasing the coal and removing as little rock as possible.

The coal deposit here is barely 4 feet thick, and very steeply pitched. As the miners remove the coal and mine upwards, they create a network of passages not even tall enough to stand up in. Wooden timbers support the solid-rock roof, and wooden ladders snake their way up through the voids to where explosives and hand tools pick at the shiny black anthracite. Gravity does the rest: the blasted coal slides down to a chute, where it’s loaded into a small rail cart and pushed along the gangway to the inclined slope to be taken to the surface, where it's crushed and sold, ending up as heating fuel.

1-5: Mining and transporting the coal underground

6-7: The mine’s headframe and hoist, tucked within the hills of central Pennsylvania, as seen from below and above.

8-10: Once the coal is mined, it’s sent to processing facilities, to be crushed into different sizes and sold, either by the bag or by the truckload. The facility shown here was built in the 1920s, around a hundred years ago; despite a rickety outside appearance, it recently underwent a several-month renovation, and the owner has no intention to shut it down any time soon.

#analog #analogphotography #film #filmphotography #ilford #ilforddelta #delta3200 #mediumformat #120film #rolleiflex #coalmine #coalmining #blackandwhite #mining taken in Coal Country by @therealgrahamb0

119

8

3 years ago

Some of my very first analog photos, taken during my teenage years at WW2 reenactment events.

As a grade-school history nerd, running around the woods playing war and old uniforms grew into a hobby that occupied most of my teenage life. The goal of being as historically-accurate as possible led to an obsession with trying to create the most "authentic" photos, using original cameras from the period and the slowest B/W film I could find. Even though I quit reenacting years ago for a variety reasons, these are still some of my favorite photos that I've taken.

Photos of guys from all over the world portraying Germans, Canadians, and Americans at different Western-front themed reenactments in England, Belgium, and Poland, all shot with a pre-war Leica.

#film #filmphotography #analog #analogphotography #blackandwhite #35mm #leica #leicaiii #leicaiiib taken in Normandy, France by @therealgrahamb0

128

6

3 years ago