Coal powered the Industrial Revolution. Coal fueled China’s rise. Yet coal has also emitted the lion’s share of carbon dioxide into the world’s atmosphere, triggering what we now know as climate change. Despite efforts to pivot to sustainable energy, China still builds six times more new coal plants than all other nations combined.

The below photo essay is adapted from COAL + ICE, an immersive photography and video exhibition at Asia Society in New York, which opened on Tuesday, and previous iterations of the exhibit. It traces a photographic arc from deep within Chinese coal mines to the melting glaciers of the greater Himalaya, by way of greenhouse-gas emitting factories. Through intimate portraits and vast altered landscapes, these photographs document the consequences triggered by our continued reliance on fossil fuels, and bring to life the environmental and human costs of climate change.

Curated by Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas and Dutch designer Jeroen de Vries, COAL + ICE was first developed by Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations (co-publishers of the China Books Review) for exhibition at Three Shadows Photography Art Center in Beijing in 2011. The exhibition traveled across China, and was on display at the U.S. Ambassador’s Residence in Paris during COP 21, then during the Global Climate Action Summit of 2018 at Fort Mason in San Francisco, and at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., before coming to Asia Society.

We hope that you find the text and photographs both edifying and provoking.

– The Editors

Curator’s introduction

Over the last decades, as the world looked to China as a producer of goods for the global market, the nation increased its demand for energy and, in turn, its dependency on coal. Our need for products is insatiable, but we rarely think about the consequences of our consumption. The world is ever-more interconnected, and our choices have a significant impact — regardless of whether it is visible to us now — on the global environment. Nowhere is this dynamic of cause and effect more evident than in the effect that the burning of coal has on climate change.

These are some of the issues that Orville Schell and I were thinking about as we set out on a road trip through Shanxi province, the heart of Chinese coal country, in the fall of 2006. We knew that we wanted to do a project together on the role of coal in China’s economic development. Our original concept was simple: Orville would write and I would take photographs. Yet the journey surprisingly evolved into a series of COAL + ICE exhibits.

In Shanxi, I felt that it was more important and appropriate to feature Chinese photographers than to make images of my own. I felt strongly that this story should be framed by Chinese rather than Western perspective. My hope was to uncover Chinese documentary photographers who had produced work over the last 30 years throughout China, finding historical and contemporary images that revealed conditions in both small and modern mines, honoring miners, that also captured the impact of coal mining on miners’ lives and communities.

As we explored, I was impressed to find exceptional work by many highly committed photographers. Song Chao, who had worked as a miner himself, had taken a series of portraits in Shandong province that were already quite well known. Geng Yunsheng had done an extensive documentary essay on life in a small mining community in Yunnan province. Niu Guozheng focused on coal mining in his hometown in Henan province, all while working as a local police officer. Yu Haibo, who was shooting for a regional newspaper, proposed to do a series of portraits of miners with their families in Henan province.

Their images, and others’, depicted work in Chinese coal mines and the lives of miners, but they also focused on the environmental impact of coal-powered plants, stressing the enormous demand for energy in China to power its growth and meet the world’s consumption desires.

Meanwhile, Orville was also becoming deeply interested in the relationship between climate change and the fate of the glaciers throughout the Greater Himalaya. In the summer of 2007, his friend David Breashears, a photographer known for summiting Mount Everest five times, began to document melting glaciers. A collector of historical mountaineering photography, Breashears was familiar with the photographs that George Mallory had taken during a series of British expeditions to Everest in the 1920s. He climbed to the exact vantage points where Mallory had stood to take precisely matched images of Himalayan glaciers. His photographs show a dramatic loss of glacial ice mass and document the melt rate of this delicate high-altitude environment.

As these two parallel photography projects moved forward, we began to envision how they were connected in a “climate change arc” from coal mines around the world to the greenhouse gases polluting our atmosphere, by way of the factories that emit those fumes – warming our planet, melting our ice, and disturbing rivers and hydrological patterns downstream along Asia’s great rivers.

This evolving exhibit has no intention to be authoritative, nor does it attempt to touch on every aspect of the coal industry and its impact on our daily lives or on the environment. It is an artistic initiative, not a scientific one. Its ambition to visualize climate change is ultimately to create a forum for an ongoing public dialogue about an immensely complex global problem at a critical moment in time. It is as urgent now as ever.

– Susan Meiselas, adapted from COAL + ICE (Asia Society Center on US-China Relations, 2012)

In recognizing that policy alone could not solve this crisis, we began asking, how else can we go at this problem? One way was visually. If we could present something that was telling at the same time as beautiful, then maybe we could get people to look.

Orville Schell

Part I: The Mines

Coal miners have been photographed through the ages as both industrial heroes and les damnés de la terre (“the damned of the earth”). These images reflect China’s complex relationship to coal, throughout the decades: the country’s reliance on it to fuel economic growth; and its awareness of its harm on human life and our environment.

I wanted to understand why, in the middle of China’s economic development, the miners still lived in such hardship and poverty. That made me want to see what the situation was like.

Geng Yunsheng

The Chinese miner is not a cold, coal-mining machine — there are rich and delicate emotions and unique characters beneath each rough appearance.

Song Chao

Each time a miner goes down the shaft, it deeply affects his wife and relatives. A lot of them had to live with this distress for decades. Their daily struggle, their attachment to their families, and their fate, are closely tied together.

Yu Haibo

Part II: The Factories

Miasmic clouds, noxious gas plumes — we are familiar with these tropes of coal-fired power plants around the world. Once the “dark Satanic Mills” staining the English countryside in the early Industrial Revolution, in the 21st century they have most closely been associated with China. And the fumes rise ever up, and up.

Recording social development and progress is the main responsibility of a photographer. Taking these images does not mean much to me personally; it is just fulfilling the obligation of a photographer to society.

Niu Guozheng

China’s rapid industrialisation over the past 30 years has seen the construction of huge numbers of coal-fired power stations.

Ian Teh

Part III: The Glaciers

It was not so long ago that the Greater Himalaya were viewed as a remote, frigid clime of little consequence, to which only the most intrepid adventurers were drawn. Their immensity evoked awe and even fear. But now these seemingly eternal and invincible aspects of our planet’s architecture are receding, and on the defensive.

There in front of me I was holding Mallory’s photo in black and white from 1921. I could immediately see the results. In fact the glacier we were looking at, the Main Rongbuk Glacier, had already melted 300 or 400 feet vertically in the span of 88 years.

David Breashears

Afterword: Message From the Glaciers

Not long ago, it would have seemed extreme for respected scientists to warn so overtly of environmental apocalypse. But now we quite regularly hear the likes of NASA’s James Hansen warn that “continued ‘business-as-usual’ emission of greenhouse gases and black soot will result in the loss of most Himalayan glaciers this century, with devastating effects on freshwater supplies.” Or we hear Chinese scientists, such as glaciologist Yao Tandong, bluntly caution that “studies indicate that by 2030 another 30% [of the Himalayan glaciers] will disappear; by 2050, 40%; and by the end of the century 70%,” and that “the full-scale glacier shrinkage in the plateau regions will eventually lead to an ecological catastrophe.”

Still, even as the scientific evidence of human impact on this defiant but delicate region piles up around us and we see these glaciers melt away before our eyes, we remain strangely reluctant to acknowledge how radically we have altered our relationship to the natural world.

Surely it is one of the great ironies of our age that even in the midst of the information technology revolution, which daily inundates us with vast quantities of information that are supposed to inform and liberate us, we are still unable to synthesize it so as to galvanize ourselves for action. There are many links in the chain of cause and effect that stretch from the coal mines to the melting glaciers of the Greater Himalaya to the Indian or Chinese peasant who relies on the waters of the Ganges or Yellow River to survive. We confront a very dangerous prospect, with no adequate effort underway to find the missing link between the knowledge that we already have and action. ∎

– Orville Schell (Arthur Ross Director, Center on U.S.-China Relations, Asia Society)

Text and images adapted from COAL + ICE (Asia Society Center on US-China Relations, 2012), and the COAL + ICE exhibition (February 13, 2024 – August 11, 2024, Asia Society Museum, New York) and its previous iterations. For further information, explore the exhibit archive and listen to Mary Kay Magistad’s COAL + ICE podcast.

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