A while back on this blog I wrote a little bit about the UK miners’ strike and imagery of coal mining. Ever since then I looked for a book of photographs from the period, depicting the strike, the battles and the hardship inflicted on communities. But I could never find one which I felt looked good, or fitted what I was looking for.

But recently I read about and then bought this new book, NO REDEMPTION by photographer Keith Pattison and writer David Peace. It looks the part, looks like a great document (I haven’t seen the actual book yet, only online).

To quote from the publishers website:  “At the height of the Miners’ Strike of 1984-85, Keith Pattison spent six months living in the Durham coastal village of Easington Colliery and photographing the people there as events took shape. With the increasing determination of the government to break the strike and force miners back to work, he witnessed from the inside a community laid siege by the state.
Making what the documentary filmmaker John Grierson termed “creative use of actuality”, Pattison framed a narrative sequence of images: from the optimism of August, through the deepening pessimism of winter, right to the final vote to return to work.
Twenty-five years later, on Election Day 2010, Pattison took the writer David Peace to Easington to interview three of the people caught up in the strike – Alan Cummings, Marilyn Johnson and her husband Jimmy. Their memories, still freshly felt, make explicit the anger, pain, resilience and warmth captured in the photographs.”

I wrote to Keith and he told me that himself and David recently returned to Easington to the Miner’s Welfare club, to launch the book and also to show the work again to the community featured. David and two actors read the parts of the three people originally interviewed to the audience of 250. And members of the audience cried as the memory of it all came back.

You can see a slideshow of the work from Keith’s book here on his website, Keith Pattison’s NO REDEMPTION.

You can buy the book NO REDEMPTION here on Flambard Press.

A great historical document, great work.