The project included five communities—two in Boone County, one in Mingo, one in Lincoln and one in Kanawha County.
On Thursday, the group from the Pond Fork area of Boone County gave the final presentation to a small audience at the Wharton Community Center.
Despite just having five members, they’ve managed to cover the walls of the community center with their photographs.
Shannon Bell organized the project as part of her Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Oregon.
“When I started the project I just told them to take pictures to tell the story of their communities,” she said. “It was very general, that includes both positive things and negative things.
“Throughout the process it seems that the themes that have really emerged have been the strengths and assets of their communities and the beauty of the communities, but also some of their concerns and some of their ideas for change.”
Some walls are covered with photos representing the community’s strengths -- a spider weaving an intricate web, a child playing on a playground, a sunflower.
Joanne Frame lives in nearby Bim. She smiles as she explains one of her photographs.
“This is our grandson; he loves to get out helping Poppy,” she said. “We wanted to teach him that you work for what you have. He had gathered tomatoes out of the garden here. He’s helping Pappy unload some rocks.”
This wall is hopeful, but as viewers make their way around the exhibit they come to photographic evidence of the community’s problems.
There are photos of roads with huge potholes because of all the coal truck traffic; of abandoned buildings, of plastic bottles littering the roadsides.
And there are numerous pictures of mountaintop removal sites. Boone County produces the most coal of any county in West Virginia.
Jane Linville goes four-wheeling through the mountains of her community, and many of her photographs document those trips. One, titled “A New Boneyard” shows piles of trees, felled to make way for mines.
“All it is are trees that are cut and left to lay there,” she said. “They’re not used for any purpose or anything. Like, that’s enough lumber there that you could build a house with that. You could open up your own sawmill with that.
“It was about a mile’s worth of trees that were cut down in that round circle there. Then when I went back a week later probably five times that much is gone. And now they’ve took a dozer and pushed all the trees into the valley and burn them up.”
The Photovoice project allowed its participants a chance to document their communities, but the women hope it will pave the way for lasting change.
Brenda Farris has protested mountaintop removal operations, but found that her photos worked just as well in raising awareness.
“I wasn’t going to do this project,” she said. “We were working on the mountaintop removal but it was kind of hard to get the message out. But through my photos maybe I could get some of the message out what’s going on around us and the blasting and people getting sick and the bad roads might show someone else what could be coming to their town.”
And already their photographs have brought about change.
Joanne and Tammy Frame took their photographs of Boone County’s scarred roads, rendered almost impassable by their numerous potholes, to their legislators.
“We went to the state legislators, which was Sen. Stollings and [Del.] Ralph Rodighiero,” Joanne Frame said. “We went to the state Capitol and talked with them and we’ve seen a lot of improvements. They’ve started patching the roads and paving and we’re supposed to get some permanent paving in the spring. So we’ve seen a lot of things happen since we went.”
And though that was the end result Bell had hoped for the project, even she didn’t expect the women’s photographs to have such an immediate impact.
“When I did it before I saw that there was the potential for bringing about positive change in the community and using their project ideas to develop initiatives in their communities, but I guess I didn’t realize how successful that could be,” she said.
The group plans to continue meeting, even though Bell’s time with the project is over. They say they’ll keep taking pictures, which they hope will bring about even more change.