Life in a Utah Coal Camp: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs of Consumers Mining Camp, Utah, 1936

In March 1936, Dorothea Lange arrived at Consumers Mining Camp in Utah, just one month after capturing her iconic “Migrant Mother” photograph in Nipomo, California. Working as a photographer for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), Lange documented the people and communities hardest hit by the Great Depression.

This exhibit of 34 photographs reveals Lange’s extraordinary ability to portray the stark, unvarnished realities of life for coal miners and their families in Carbon County. As one of the FSA’s key photographers, she was tasked with acting as a “social investigator,” using her camera to record “the major currents of our time as they manifest themselves pictorially in any one locality.”

Lange’s brief assignment in Carbon County formed part of a broader FSA effort to document economic hardship across the western United States. Consumers, located in the Gordon Creek Mining District about 17 miles northwest of Price, was home to the Consumers Mutual Coal Company mine, which opened in 1924. The operation later continued under the Blue Blaze Coal Company, which used the “Blue Blaze Coal” trade name previously associated with the Consumers Mutual company.

Although Lange spent only a single day in and around the camp, her images powerfully capture the impoverished conditions faced by miners and their families. The photographs depict the Blue Blaze mine and tipple, the company store, rows of simple miners’ shanties, and scenes of women and children working and playing in the camp.

This exhibition was curated by Utah State University Gallery East Director Noel Carmack, with photo editing and printing by Jason Huntzinger. Scans of Lange’s original field reports were generously provided by Eileen Hansen, program manager and archivist at the Oakland Museum of California. The exhibition was made possible through the generous support of USU Eastern Administration and the USU College of Arts and Sciences. These images are printed from the Library of Congress's Prints & Photographs Division (public domain) collection.

Image Credit:
Left: Miner at Consumers (detail)
Right: Dorothea Lange and Her Camera (detail)

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