Louie Palu, Drilling a cross-cut on a ramp, 1750 foot level, Kerr Mine, Virginiatown, Ontario.
Louie Palu: Cage Call: Life & Death in the Hard Rock Mining Belt
April 10 – June 6, 2006
Teck Gallery
Louie Palu is a Globe and Mail photographer based in Toronto. The photographs in this exhibition are a small selection from the thousands of images he made between 1991 and 2003 in the mines and mining towns of Northern Ontario and Western Quebec.
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.
Many of the mines Palu has photographed were developed by Teck Corporation (now Teck Cominco), which the gallery space was named after in honour of Teck's support of the Vancouver campus of Simon Fraser University.
Curated by Bill Jeffries.