Speaker 1 (00:00:00):
Coming up on Art Palace, 

Speaker 2 (00:00:02):
Four of the songs from the Dear Companion record have been used in major primetime TV shows, and they're all talking about mountaintop removal and they're all talking about a poisoned environment, but they're in the feelgood comedy of the year or whatever. 

Speaker 1 (00:00:32):
Welcome to Art Palace, produced by Cincinnati Art Museum. This is your host Russell iig. Here at the Art Palace, we meet cool people and then talk to them about art. Today's cool people are Guy Mendez and Daniel Martin Moore. Guy Mendez is a photographer whose work is featured in the exhibition, Kentucky Renaissance, the Lexington Camera Club, and its community 1954 to 1974. And Daniel Martin Moore is a recording artist from Kentucky who has released albums on sub pop records and also founded his own label, old Uck Recordings. Both Guy and Daniel are passionate about environmental issues that affect Kentucky and these causes have impacted both of their artistic outputs. This interview was part of our in conversation series and was recorded live on November 17th, 2016. Our curatorial assistant of photography, Emily Bauman moderated this conversation. I'll apologize again that we had some scratchy mics this evening, but they clear up a lot after the first minute. 

Speaker 3 (00:01:40):
So as we get started, I was thinking about the roles of collaboration and community that have been so central in Kentucky Renaissance, which of course is the exhibition on view upstairs of photographs by Lexington Camera Club members. As we get our conversation going, maybe you could tell us a little bit about how the two of you came to know each other. 

Speaker 2 (00:02:04):
I met Daniel in 2010 when I set out to make some pictures of him and Ben, so Lee, for the Dear Companion album. And I had been in that ballroom for a late night party, 30 something years ago and remembered it, and I knew it was always empty in part because it's three flights up, three long flights of stairs up in no elevator, and most of the building is rental apartments in a restaurant on Main Street. But I thought of that ballroom and it was great except for shooting toward big windows and trying to figure that out. But it was the first time I met Daniel and I'd known Ben for a while through Philip March Jones in Lexington, who runs Institute 1 93. And I soon learned that Daniel had a 

Speaker 4 (00:03:03):
Degree in 

Speaker 2 (00:03:03):
Photography 

Speaker 4 (00:03:05):
From N Kku, 

Speaker 2 (00:03:06):
Right? 

Speaker 4 (00:03:07):
Yeah. I studied with Barry Anderson and Barbara Houghton and Matthew Albritton who was still there. And looking at that picture, I wish I had sent you some of the pictures that I took of you that day. 

Speaker 2 (00:03:22):
That's right. 

Speaker 4 (00:03:22):
There's a really beautiful image that I wish I could share with you. Maybe if y'all are on Twitter or something, I'll tweet it later if you want, but it's a picture of guy setting up the four by five or framing a shot with the four by five and Ben sitting out in the middle of the room's. Really? I love it. 

Speaker 2 (00:03:43):
Yes. You see my legs in a black cloth in a tripod. That's about it. I looked great. So that's how I met Daniel. It was basically a commissioned job to help him with 

Speaker 4 (00:03:57):
This 

Speaker 2 (00:03:57):
Album. But having learned about strip mining 45, 50 years ago, the early forms of strip mining were much were disastrous, but they were more not as disastrous as mountaintop removal, where in the old days they learned they could take highway equipment and just start cutting benches out of Mountain Sos and then pushing the spoil down in the creek and then augering or drilling out the coal in the seams. And then years later, they realized they could just take the whole mountain down and that's when Appalachian voices and other groups were rallying people against the practice. And unfortunately it still goes on, don't matter what democratic or Republican administrations have been in coal has been king. And so I was eager to work with them because I knew that 

Speaker 4 (00:04:57):
Here was 

Speaker 2 (00:04:59):
A new crowd, new set of people working against something I had worked against a long time ago. 

Speaker 3 (00:05:05):
Daniel, you've said that raising awareness of mountaintop removal is really the mission that you set for dear companion. And I have to admit, before I did research for tonight's conversation, it wasn't something that I am familiar with. And I wondered if you could tell our members of the audience who also might not be familiar, what it is and what its effects are on the environment and on the communities. 

Speaker 4 (00:05:29):
Well, it's just, as guy said, it's called mountaintop removal because that's what they do. They remove the mountaintops. It's not just the, like a thin layer at the top of the mountain. Sometimes it's hundreds and hundreds of feet and by a mountain, a mountain in Appalachia isn't like a mountain in the Rockies where there's a defined peak like Pine Mountain for is 125 miles 

Speaker 2 (00:05:59):
Long. 

Speaker 4 (00:06:00):
It's a ridge. And so 

Speaker 2 (00:06:01):
A mountaintop removal site could be several square miles 

Speaker 4 (00:06:05):
And it could 

Speaker 2 (00:06:06):
Be 300 feet 

Speaker 4 (00:06:08):
Of that ridge that has been detonated pushed 

Speaker 2 (00:06:12):
Around 

Speaker 4 (00:06:13):
Down into 

Speaker 2 (00:06:15):
The 

Speaker 4 (00:06:15):
Valleys. And 

Speaker 2 (00:06:19):
You can 

Speaker 4 (00:06:19):
Imagine 

Speaker 2 (00:06:21):
How disruptive that is to an 

Speaker 4 (00:06:23):
Ecosystem, but 

Speaker 2 (00:06:25):
It's not just wildlife and wilderness out there. There are also 

Speaker 4 (00:06:30):
Hundreds and hundreds and thousands of people who 

Speaker 2 (00:06:33):
Live 

Speaker 4 (00:06:33):
All through the region 

Speaker 2 (00:06:34):
And whose homes are shaken off the foundation in the watersheds? Oh, in the watersheds. I mean, right now 

Speaker 4 (00:06:41):
This 

Speaker 2 (00:06:41):
Is water from 

Speaker 4 (00:06:43):
The watershed. 

Speaker 2 (00:06:46):
There is mountaintop removal. 

Speaker 4 (00:06:48):
Hopefully 

Speaker 2 (00:06:50):
The pollutants have been filtered out of 

Speaker 4 (00:06:52):
This, but 

Speaker 2 (00:06:53):
The Ohio River is part of the watershed that is a big sandy, Kentucky. Millions 

Speaker 4 (00:07:00):
Of people live downstream from this practice. And to date, is it 500 plus mountains have been at 

Speaker 2 (00:07:09):
Least 

Speaker 4 (00:07:09):
Detonated 

Speaker 2 (00:07:11):
More in West Virginia than Kentucky, but still a lot in Kentucky. 

Speaker 4 (00:07:17):
It's an extraordinarily destructive thing. And the reason that you've never heard of it is because it's very intentionally hidden. Because when people find out about it and when they see it, and when you see pictures of it, you're like, that can't be real. And if you ever are able to actually set foot on one of these sites, you become a crusader against the practice almost instantly because it's so clearly wrong. Some people feel opposition to it from a religious sense, like we're supposed to be taking care of the earth, we're supposed to be stewards of the earth, 

Speaker 2 (00:08:00):
Love your mother. 

Speaker 4 (00:08:01):
But you look out over three or four square miles of just utter obliteration, the forest is gone and it's a moonscape, but 

Speaker 2 (00:08:10):
And it ain't coming back. 

Speaker 4 (00:08:11):
Yeah, 

Speaker 2 (00:08:14):
Can't put that back. 

Speaker 4 (00:08:15):
It's hidden because when you find out about it, you start raising your voice to stop it. And it is phenomenal. It still surprises me that it isn't more seen, but it's always a ridge away from the interstate, so you can't see it from the roads. And yeah, it's astonishing. It really is. 

Speaker 2 (00:08:45):
And the chemicals that end up in the water are affecting people's health, children, adults, all down in the watershed. And there've been new studies in the last number of years to prove that. So it's not just, oh, there was just a bunch of snakes up there. I've heard one coal miner tell me. It was just a bunch of snakes and a bunch of old scrub trees. And no, it was a mixed mesophilic forest with one of the most diverse forests in the world. And yet Harry Coddle, who wrote the bellwether book Knight comes to the Cumberlands back in the sixties, was a state senator and wonderful orator, and he fought the strip binding for a long time. He used to say that Eastern Kentucky could have been like Switzerland, but it was bought up by energy companies back in the early 20th century. And for pennies, they bought mineral rights separate from the surface rights, and not until the, I think it was in the eighties, we finally got a law that banned the broad form deeded that allowed anyone who had a mineral right to your property could tear the hell out of the surface to get to those minerals. 

Speaker 2 (00:10:06):
And this whole phony war on coal over the last number of years politicians have railed against, that's fictitious. Really, the coal is down because natural gas is up and fracking has become Pennsylvania and Oklahoma and places are experiencing terrible environmental difficulties from fracking, but we're benefiting from cheaper natural gas. One new problem in Kentucky is they want to run pipelines through with fracking waste so they can send 'em down to Texas to refine 'em into other things and make more money on the waste that they've created in Pennsylvania and other places and communities have risen up and fought those pipelines. And one of 'em was coming through a farm that my wife and her two brothers own near Frankfurt, Kentucky, and they went to meetings and fought it. And then the Sisters of Loretto, a group of Catholic nuns down near the Gethsemane Abbey in Nelson County, Kentucky near Bardstown. It was to come across their property. And when the Sisters of Loretto got out and started protesting, I think the pipeline company knew they had to go elsewhere but nest with nuns. But anyway, I think the problem still exist because coal companies still own these minerals and they still want to get out all they can, and it's cheaper just to blast the hell out of it than to employ. There are fewer miners employed because they're bigger machines, and it's not a guy in a pickax anymore. 

Speaker 3 (00:11:51):
Daniel, in interviews said that Kentucky has always been rich and fertile ground for music and art, and I wondered if you could talk a little bit about how you see the protection and the celebration of the rich cultural heritage in the Appalachian Mountain region as connected to this issue of top removal. 

Speaker 4 (00:12:15):
Yeah, I think that as the people in the region left to find other economic opportunities, the culture also started to disperse. And I think that was in some ways a good thing because it sort of spread country music, what is unquote country music all over the place, but think that we were to make real investments in the communities and real infrastructure investments that the musical culture would flourish as well. And not just the music, but all of the arts. I mean, there are amazing photographers, obviously from Kentucky and actors, some of the most famous actors in the world are from Kentucky, and 

Speaker 2 (00:13:09):
George Clooney, 

Speaker 4 (00:13:10):
George Clooney, Johnny Depp, he's from Paducah. Do y'all know that? Really? Tomlin's 

Speaker 2 (00:13:17):
From Paducah. 

Speaker 4 (00:13:18):
Yeah. But even for me, it really is a human rights. I love the land. And this photograph behind us is a great example of, would you say that's an intermittent stream or is that a, 

Speaker 2 (00:13:38):
It's a protected area in Lily's Woods, in Letcher County, an old man named Lily Cornett had Harry Coddle his lawyer, protect the property in perpetuity and their strip mines 

Speaker 3 (00:13:53):
And 

Speaker 2 (00:13:54):
Mountaintop removals around it. But it's an old growth forest that has been protected 

Speaker 3 (00:14:00):
And Guy, do I remember correctly, is this the photograph that's on the inside of Deer Companion? 

Speaker 4 (00:14:05):
Yeah. Yes. It's in the gatefold. When you open the record, it goes from side to side. It's so beautiful. It's so beautiful. And I think everyone who is opposed to mountaintop removal loves the forests and loves the wildlife because Eastern Kentucky is as beautiful as, I mean, I've seen rainforests on two continents and hiking up bad branch falls is just as beautiful as anything I've ever seen. I, it's such an extraordinary place. But on top of that, I think the opposition to mountaintop removal for me is most deeply rooted in equity justice for people, for Kentuckians, for citizens. It's like this is a human rights issue. These people are being poisoned and terrorized, and that's not hyperbole. They're actually being poisoned. And 

Speaker 2 (00:15:05):
Actually terrorists, their newspaper is burned down like the mountain eagle was in 1974, Tom and Pat G's the Mountain Eagle because they fought against strip mining. And the Mountain Eagle logo used to say it screams. And after the fire, when they came back, it said, it still screams. But I think the community that's rallied against it includes locals, which of course you'd need local people who are being most affected, but also writers and an artist from other parts of the state and other states who joined together to produce. There've been these flyover events where they gather some artists and writers and fly you over. You've been on those, right? I was supposed to go on one, but I had a knee operation instead. But I saw some of the pictures. And as a photographer, I'm not real big on pictures of destruction and ugliness, but I understand the need for repertorial pictures that show what's the abomination of the scope of the destruction. But I think so a community of like-minded people gathered and produced some books. And people like Eric Reese who read here recently had a book called Lost Mountain that was serialized in Harper's, I think. 

Speaker 2 (00:16:37):
So it's been a terrible, terrible for the whole region. And now that coal is not king anymore, things are really bad for the folks down there in terms of employment and cleaning up the environment. There's a huge fund of money of unspent money from reclamation fees that the coal companies paid, and people are trying to pry some of that money out of Washington to give it back to the people that were most affected in the region. 

Speaker 3 (00:17:15):
I think it's really interesting with projects that I've seen that both of you have worked on, you have a really positive sort of pictured guy. You're showing us these beautiful sun dappled valleys and dear companion, for example, even though one might think of it as a sort of protest album, it's not. It's more of love letter or 

Speaker 2 (00:17:39):
A prayer. Sometimes it's just a prayer, but prayer is good. 

Speaker 3 (00:17:46):
Daniel, you've worked with fellow writers, singers, musicians, and producers to raise awareness about mountaintop removal. Could you talk a little bit about how that kind of collaboration develops about how that affects the creative process and sort of the back and forth between that and your goal to protect the environment? 

Speaker 4 (00:18:09):
Sure. I think, well, Ben and I were first connected over, that's how we met, because I posted a song that I wrote called Fly Rock Blues on MySpace, 

Speaker 5 (00:18:27):
Will Fly Rock Blues, got me down, got me down, got me down, got me way down. People pray. Don't you land on me, don't you bust my house, just lemme be on my own ground. 

Speaker 4 (00:18:55):
And somebody, I don't know, one of his friends heard it and sent it to him and was like, Hey, man, we were just talking about this exact thing. And so Ben wrote to me, and I was going to be in Lexington, just happened to be coming to Lexington a few days later. So we met, had a coffee, and we're just talking about a lot of the things that we had read and the things that we had seen. And Eric Reese's Lost Mountain was Eric here talking about Utopian Drive, his new book? Yeah, I love that guy. I just want to say that he's wonderful. If you might not know Eric Reese, the author, 

Speaker 5 (00:19:34):
Explain what Fly Rock 

Speaker 4 (00:19:35):
Is. Oh, so Fly Rock is a term that is used on these mine sites for, what would you say? Unanticipated projectiles. Boulders. Yeah, boulders. And here's the thing, I mean, these explosions are enormous in scale. Gale, a small one would bring this entire building down. They're huge. They're huge explosions. And sometimes even though the engineers aren't incredibly intelligent and thorough, they don't quite get everything just right. And giant boulders the size of this room, some of the bigger ones, and sometimes they're smaller, but they might go tumbling down the mountain in a way that wasn't anticipated. And there are several stories from the last 40, 50 years of these boulders killing people, crushing houses. A family was killed in 1970, what year was that? 

Speaker 5 (00:20:45):
I'm not sure. 

Speaker 4 (00:20:47):
1976. And a little boy was killed in 2005 in his sleep, a boulder crushed his whole room, basically came coming through the wall and killed him in his bed. And they've landed on cars. And that is an image that, I mean, just couldn't get it out of my head. And anyway, I wrote that song about just the whole situation really. And that was one that was completely done when I met Ben, but then we really hit it off personally. He's one of my best friends now. But we started writing and writing more songs individually and a few together. 

Speaker 4 (00:21:40):
And I think your question was about collaboration and what are the factors that make it work or don't work in this context? And I think a lot of artists, just like a lot of people, you just think, what can you do when you see something that maybe feels like an injustice or something that's wrong and you want to help, you want to be a positive force, you want to be constructive. And I think two musicians were like, well, let's make a record and let's go on tour. And we also struggle so much. I think most artists and especially performing artists, struggle with what is too much because nobody coming to a show wants to get preached at. You know what I mean? It's like, I mean, how quickly do we roll our eyes when Bono starts talking about starving this and that in a stadium full of 50,000 people at $150 a ticket or whatever. You're just like, okay. So I feel like there's a lot of comradery that we all feel just being like, what can we do that's not ridiculous, that's not somehow inappropriate. 

Speaker 2 (00:22:57):
That's not blowing up giant dozers. Right, exactly. It's a different way to go. Yeah, it's another option. 

Speaker 4 (00:23:05):
But yeah, I think a lot of artists end up just making records and trying to, hopefully when we made Deer Companion, we wanted to make a record that could stand on its own and that you could hear on the radio or something. And not that you wouldn't know that it was about mountaintop removal, but that it wouldn't be a stumbling block. It's not like a protest record in that there's nothing fun about it or beautiful about it. It's just somebody going like, this is wrong. Have to stop. Those are terrible records. It's awful. So we tried to write songs that we thought were good and cool and beautiful, but they also talked about these issues. And in a way to sort of sneak it in under the gatekeepers who would normally keep political stuff off the air or off of television, 

Speaker 2 (00:24:14):
We had several 

Speaker 4 (00:24:14):
Conversations about creating things that would be possibly of interest to people like music supervisors at TV shows. And four of the songs from the Dear Companion record have been used in major primetime TV shows. And they're all talking about mountaintop removal, and they're all talking about a poison environment, but they're in the feel good comedy of the year or whatever. And it's like we're sort of trying to honestly be subversive in that way. And 

Speaker 2 (00:24:52):
That's the way I see you all as traveling minstrels from the old days, who tell the tale. They come to your town, they tell you things you haven't heard about, and they might do it in story or song form, but it's Woody Guthrie. It's people out there traveling and not preaching, but like you say, but getting the word out and admire you all for doing that. Thanks, man. 

Speaker 3 (00:25:24):
Guy. You wrote, produced and directed documentary television for K e t for over 30 years before that you were a founding member of the Blue Tail Fly. Can you talk a little bit about projects that have been really memorable for you in terms of activism? 

Speaker 2 (00:25:44):
Well, I guess my original experience with environmental activism involved the Red River Gorge. And in the mid sixties, the Corps of Engineers, US Army Corps of Engineers, pushed by a very influential Eastern Kentucky politician, wanted to make a lake out of this beautiful paleolithic area and make it into a place for motorboats and water skiing and so forth. And locals were outraged about it. The Sierra Club fought it, but not until Justice William O. Douglas, who was in his seventies or eighties even came and hiked in the Red River Gorge in 1967, did the tide turn and a governor and a senator, Senator John Sherman Cooper quietly fought against it behind the back of this other representative, a congressman, and the gorge was saved, but it took a while and all protest movements take a while to affect change. And the lesson there was that it might've been several years in protests and legal wrangling, but eventually it was stopped. 

Speaker 2 (00:27:04):
And now it's an incredibly popular place for people from places like Ohio to come and hike or climb. It's a great climbing Becca now, which it wasn't back then because rock climbing wasn't big back then in the sixties, but now it's people come from all around the world there. And a ranger a few years back told me that they had a real problem in the Red River Gorge with UFOs. And I said, UFOs, really? And he said, unidentified falling, Ohioans, kids get drunk. They roll off the ridge and in the middle of the night, and it happens every year. So it's been preserved, and when you go there, you feel the enormity of nature and your smallness in it. And when I took my kids there, they were at total awe of like, what is this place? Well, it's a place, it was carved out over millions of years by water and their beautiful arches and all this was going to be underwater, of course. 

Speaker 2 (00:28:03):
But so that was one battle. And then there was the civil rights movement. That was kind of just before my time in college, but it was still happening. And the first activist on the UK campus were the Black Student Union members, which I got to be friends with. And suddenly I had black friends. I grew up in segregated New Orleans. It was very much white water fountain, black colored water fountains and that sort of thing through my upbringing. And we didn't have African-American history in high school or any knowledge of civil rights. And suddenly I had black friends who were talking about Africa, and I was like, oh my God, I'm starting to understand. 

Speaker 2 (00:28:50):
So there was civil rights, and then it kind of blended into the anti-war movement. And then that big gap, the environmental movement and the Blue Tail fly, one thing that we were proud of is that Wendell Berry gave a speech on the first Earth Day. It was called Think Little as opposed to Think Big. And it was a manifesto for environmental action. And it talked about how we all had to look into our own lives, even to our use of natural resources and our wastefulness and so forth. And it was later reproduced in the Whole Earth Catalog, but we published it first right after that first Earth Day was the spring of 1970. And not only environmental battles, you can't just win them once. You have to keep winning them over and over because someone's going to come along and want to develop that undeveloped forest. We can't stop fighting for the environment, 

Speaker 2 (00:29:54):
Especially now that the commander in chief is a climate change denier, which goes against 98% of the scientific research and people who say that climate change is real, and that's why we're having these global treaties that may go by the wayside now we don't know. But the environmental movement beget the anti-nuclear movement. And that was important around here because right up river from Cincinnati at Moscow, Indiana, there was a plant being built called the Zimmer Plant nuclear power. And right just up river from Louisville near Madison, Indiana, a plant was being built called Marble Hill, and protest groups grew up in both cities, Louisville and Cincinnati. The one Louisville was called the Paddle Wheel Alliance, I think. And there was to be a big sit-in or a crossing of the fence onto the property where Marble Hill was. And we were trained in nonviolent methods. 

Speaker 2 (00:31:04):
And then eight 60 something of us got arrested, including Wendell Berry. And then we were released and nothing ever happened to us, but because all we really did was set foot on the property. But at Marble Hill, someone smuggled out x-rays of wells of this complicated nuclear facility and the wells were deficient. And that was one of the things that helped stop that plant. I forget exactly, but the protest helped. But the Zimmer plant was also stopped, and this was all after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, when it was clear that nuclear power was not perfect, and that not only was there were the danger of meltdown, but there was the problem of the 250,000 shelf year shelf life of the nuclear materials, the waste that they were going to generate. So that was another situation where you fought for years and didn't know what the outcome was going to be. And then finally there was we achieved the result we wanted, which was the cancellation of those plants after millions had been spent. So those were the kind of things that were happening in the sixties, seventies, eighties. 

Speaker 4 (00:32:20):
Guy. Have you heard anything about the, I just heard this little blip on the radio the other day and I made a note to look it up, but I haven't done it yet. But there's apparently a company known as ge Hitachi, which I don't know what that means. It's just like a joint venture between the two companies, but they've just gotten a permit. They've just been greenlit for some processing facility outside of Paducah that's going to turn depleted uranium into usable uranium. Again, you read anything about that? 

Speaker 2 (00:32:55):
I haven't heard that. But Paducah is where one of the nuclear, there was a triangle where nuclear material was traveling to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Paducah, Kentucky, because it had a uranium enrichment plant there that was part of the nuclear bomb process. And there was a place, was it Portsmouth, Ohio? There was a kind of a triangle where when you started to understand the danger of nuclear materials and you realize, oh my God, we're in between and this stuff's traveling on the highways and train cars and whatnot. So Paducah has had that atomic energy facility for a long time. So I guess they're trying to make some money off of the fact that 

Speaker 4 (00:33:43):
They say it's not for military use. They say it's just for a nuclear power plant 

Speaker 2 (00:33:48):
To make your watches glow or what? I guess guess, I 

Speaker 4 (00:33:51):
Don't know. 

Speaker 3 (00:33:52):
Let me swing us back around. Guy. In 2013, there was an exhibition of your photographs of the Marble Creek Gorge at Ann Tower Gallery on Main Street and Lexington. And also that year writers, including Wendell Berry, Morris Manning, and Eric Reese and also musical artists, gave a benefit performance in opposition to show opposition of the I 75 connector. I'm interested in the way that people have been working together across different media to come together for that cause. And also specifically in the photographs that you've taken, because I don't want to leap too much, but they do a little bit. Your photographs of the Marble Creek Gorge make me think of the photographs that Ralph Meaty yard took for the unforeseen wilderness. 

Speaker 2 (00:34:49):
Jean Ard and Wendell Berry did a book called The Unforeseen Wilderness. They spent long camping trips there over the course of a couple of years in the Red River Gorge. And some of those prints are in the show upstairs and there there've been a couple of attempts to reproduce those prints in books. And only one of 'em, a North Point press book came anywhere near the quality of the original prints. The first edition was too dark, one edition was too gray. But those pictures were kind of like the pictures made in the late 19th century that people brought back to Washington to show what we had out west because we didn't know what we had out west and oh, we need to make some national parks out there. I think Gene felt that his pictures would help save the gorge when people realized the wonder and the majesty of the place. 

Speaker 2 (00:35:41):
And so years later, I started going to Marble Creek, which is in Jasmine County down near the Kentucky River about 30 minutes south of Lexington. And my former sister-in-law has lived there since the mid seventies when I started going there. And when I first started going to Marble Creek, it was really to jump naked in the creek, but I always had a camera with me. And then I realized over the years, I started taking a view camera there and realizing that I had a place I could photograph for the rest of my life. Basically. It's not that long a creek, but it's a gorge and it has some towering rocks and it feeds into the Kentucky River. But about 15 years ago, it was threatened by a connector, an I 75 connector to get semi-truck from Nicholasville, Kentucky to I 75 faster when they had to go through to Lexington to get to I 75. 

Speaker 2 (00:36:44):
And this four lane highway would've come right down Marble Creek. And the idea was beaten back about 15 years ago and a lot of environmental victories 10 years later, a few years ago, the plan resurfaced and the new plan had four routes for the new road, which is going to cost millions and millions of dollars so that trucks can get faster to the interstate, and it goes across pristine, bluegrass, farmland. And one of the four routes was right down Marble Creek. So people, local residents were protesting and going to meetings and regaling the highway department that was behind this and the politicians that were behind it. And so we, I suddenly looked back and I've been photographing for 40 years in this Marble Creek Gorge, and I realized I could put a pretty good show together. And they're not protest pictures, but they're, like I said before, they're more like prayers or hymns, the things I learned from the camera club. 

Speaker 2 (00:38:00):
And people like gene meat yard, that one of the things, this photographs have many D, there are many different kinds of photographs. There's pictures on your driver's license or repertorial pictures of the world as it is. And then there are pictures that take you other places. There are pictures of traffic and metaphor and mystery and huh. And that's the first time I saw gene meat yard's pictures. I'd never seen anything like them. And I just thought, well, this is something else. This is poetry, and I want to find out more about that. And so for almost 50 years I've been trying to find out more about it. So the landscape pictures of Marble Creek to me, were a kind of bringing artifacts back from a place that looks like it did probably millions of years ago. It's still pretty pristine. Daniel Boone and his family lived there a couple of years after they left Boonsboro. 

Speaker 2 (00:39:00):
So it's got historic. There's some foundations that we think might've been Boone's Cabin with his family. There are graveyards with just stone markers of freed slaves who settled and when slaves are freed, some of the landowners gave them some of the land along Marble Creek. So it has that history too. And it's a great place of biological diversity and rare species. So I put together a show and the pictures were hymns to the environment to make people understand that it's a precious entity, a living, breathing wonderland. And then we had this kind of hoot nanny thing. Barbara King solver was another author who was involved. She's from Kentucky and her cousin lives along Marble Creek. 

Speaker 2 (00:39:58):
And so we raised some money for lawyers. We got about 500 people to come to this event and pay for it. And that helped because they ended up taking the Marble Creek route off of their list of possible routes. And that was yay good. But there's still three possible routes that go across prime farmland and an international group several years back that rates environmental calamities and potential disasters said that the bluegrass farmland was one of the most threatened environments in the world because of the rapid rate of development of suburbs and commercial developments into that bluegrass farmland, which is the reason we have the horse farms and the cattle farms and had the tobacco farms, and we will have the pup and hemp farms we're already growing industrial hemp, and seven states now are legalizing marijuana. And Kentucky used to be the leading hemp producing state in the country and grew wild in a lot of places. And so when I read about Colorado making millions of dollars and I hear about how Kentucky's cutting back its money for education, it's like, well, I know one of the answers for that. So the Marble Creek thing is ongoing though. Marble Creek has been spared, but other routes are still being considered. And so there's still more meetings to go to and more letters to write, but people have a large capacity to fight the power, 

Speaker 4 (00:41:33):
Power of the people. 

Speaker 3 (00:41:36):
Daniel, do you feel like as you set about to make music that is also connected to an environmental protection cause, did you have a mentor that you were looking to someone who showed you the path, this is how I can use my art for good, or do you feel like you were sort of inventing that process for yourself? 

Speaker 4 (00:42:01):
I had definitely people who set a great example for that kind of writing, but no one that I knew personally. You know what I mean? I admired Jean Ritchie long before I ever met her, and that was, I still mean she's still a guiding light for me as a human being, not only as an artist, but of course Woody Guthrie and Johnny Cash, even Dolly Parton. I mean even who you don't really think of as being a political writer. She's tough though. Oh man, she's so tough, so brilliant. And I think outside of music as well, I was raised in a household that really cared about the world and cared about people. 

Speaker 4 (00:43:13):
Your parents are here, my parents are here, and I think I look to them and I'm thankful to them for instilling values in me that still guide my work probably in ways that I don't even understand. But I don't know, I think kind of like what guy said about his photographs, it's like you're going to work on whatever is inspiring you and things will push you. When Guy was making pictures 40 years ago in the place, in all the places that are being threatened by development and highways and everything, he wasn't thinking, well in 40 years I'm going to use these to protest. No, he was meditating on the space and being a part of it and reacting to it. That's what I was doing. 

Speaker 4 (00:44:19):
And skinny dipping apparently. But I feel like you're going to write even whatever, whether you're a writer or not or a musician or not, you're going to be writing about thinking about talking with your friends about whatever is capturing your imagination or driving you absolutely crazy, whatever the case is. And so it's kind of like, I guess it's difficult to exactly pinpoint a precise influence, but you just sort of feel lucky to be able to do it and to be able to focus on that in a way that might not necessarily be reasonable from a economic perspective or from a cultural norm perspective. You know what I mean? I dunno if that makes sense or not. I think that we have some time to take 

Speaker 6 (00:45:18):
Questions from our audience. I guess a question probably for Guy, just because he has more experience, but Daniel, feel free to chime in. You talk about working for 40 years on these environmental issues and these kind of things, you have to constantly beat back every five, 10 years, the same issue comes up. How do you stick with it? How do you keep from getting discouraged? How do you keep from throwing up your hands and saying, you know what, just can't do it 

Speaker 2 (00:45:51):
Anymore. It's hard sometime. I mean, we've just seen you got to get up, put your feet on the floor the next day and keep after it. It can be difficult and it can take a long time and you think it may never work out that you can stop things that are degrading the world we live in, but obviously it's something you have to do all your lifelong, because there are always going to be people who want to capitalize, who see land as something they can make money on as opposed to a God-given thing that we all should take care of and leave in better shape for the next generations. And that keeps me going. What about you? 

Speaker 4 (00:46:53):
Yeah, same thing. You can't, people like Mitch McConnell never retire, so we can't either. You know what I mean, 

Speaker 2 (00:47:09):
Senator? No. 

Speaker 4 (00:47:14):
Yeah. I mean it's love. It's like you don't stop loving someone because you're going through a difficult situation and you don't stop loving the world just because other people are maybe trying to blow it up or just not thinking about it the way that you are or whatever. It's like you're devoted to it because what else do you do? You know what I mean? What's the alternative? There is no alternative really. Yeah, 

Speaker 2 (00:47:50):
In recent years, there have been more church affiliated green movement that I've read about, which is fine. I think it's a very powerful religious kind of thing to protect the earth and keep it from destruction because those forces are out there and they're newer, bigger machines to tear it up. And if they can't tear up our Eastern Kentucky for coal, they'll tear up Wyoming for coal even though the prices are going down. And it also helps slow the rise of alternative fuels and solar and wind and hydro and all the other alternative sources of energy. 

Speaker 2 (00:48:49):
Every year there's a march on Frankfurt in the springtime, a Save iHeart Mountains Day it's called. And we all go out and Trump cross the bridge and head to the capitol and have a big rally. And a few years back, the actress Ashley Judd came and she gave a great speech about how eastern Kentucky could be the green capital of the United States. It could be a place where innovation is nurtured and startups and various kinds of alternative energies and so forth. And I just thought, wow, this woman should be elected to public office. And I think she toyed with the idea and then decided not to run, but it's probably best for her not to. But we could have used a voice like that, somebody that people look up to, and you don't expect things like that to come out of her mouth about the terrors that have been visited upon the people of eastern Kentucky by these giant corporations who take the money and run. 

Speaker 4 (00:49:55):
I don't 

Speaker 7 (00:49:55):
Think 

Speaker 4 (00:49:55):
She's out of the game completely. 

Speaker 2 (00:49:57):
Well, that's good. 

Speaker 4 (00:49:57):
I mean, I would say 

Speaker 2 (00:50:00):
She's very smart. 

Speaker 7 (00:50:01):
We can hang on for Ashley Judge. 

Speaker 2 (00:50:03):
I wouldn't 

Speaker 4 (00:50:03):
Be surprised if in the coming years 

Speaker 2 (00:50:07):
She could be the first woman president. 

Speaker 7 (00:50:10):
Please. 

Speaker 4 (00:50:12):
My question is also for Guy, please don't misconstrue my question. I'm in awe of this photograph, especially on this scale, but maybe you could educate me 

Speaker 7 (00:50:24):
Why 

Speaker 4 (00:50:25):
As an artist and a photographer, 

Speaker 7 (00:50:26):
You would choose black and white over color? 

Speaker 2 (00:50:30):
Well, early on it was what there was, color was still fairly new when I was coming up in the sixties, and though it had been around for a while, but what you could process yourself more easily, it was black and white. And over the years, I've made color transparencies and now digital color, but I still make four by five black and white and two and a quarter inch black and white film and 35 black and white film because I love the quality that it gives. I love the richness of the silver image. And there's also a matter of longevity. Silver prints, the old style black and white prints. When they're archivally processed, they are said to be able to last thousands of years if they're kept in someplace other than Kentucky with a lot of humidity and whatnot. So there's an archival life value. There's the beauty of it, the black and white, not only, it's a kind of abstraction. 

Speaker 2 (00:51:40):
I mean, the world is not black and white. The world is not this big, the world's not this big. So you're making things smaller. I think graphically black and white images are sometimes a lot stronger. I love color, work color color is great. I am not dissing it or anything like that. So it was what I could do in my bathroom, in my little dark room. Color processing was a lot more complicated. I did some siba chrome for a while where you made a print through color gels, filters, and then you put it in a tank and waited 10 minutes and then you open the tank and it was crappy and you had to go back and start all over again. So it was a very laborious process, whereas black and white, you could develop your film, you proof it, and then you start making work prints. 

Speaker 2 (00:52:39):
And so that's how I came up. But a friend of mine that I went to school with, Sam Abel, went on to work for National Geographic and made the most wonderful color pictures, some of the most wonderful in the world, and I've admired those a lot. And every now and then I make a color picture that I really like, but occasionally in digital I'll make it in color and then I'll switch it to black and white and go, I like it better in black and white. It's stronger graphically. It has a little more bump to it. And so now I'm kind of confusing myself. And I'll go out and I'll shoot, like on Marble Creek, I'll set up little games for myself. I'll shoot with a four by five. You get under two exposures in a half hour's time. And then I'll shoot it with the digital camera and go back to the real dark room and then the digital dark room and the computer and come up with the prints and compare them on one picture from Marble Creek of some sycamore leaves with a light coming through them. 

Speaker 2 (00:53:42):
I thought the four by five black and white would be the best, but because it's slower film like a s a 50 or a hundred, and you're under dapple light, you got exposed for one Ansil Adams, two Ansil Adams, three ansil items, three seconds or so. So the leaves start blurring. And sometimes I like the blur, but this one image I'm referring to, I looked at the color digital image, which had the beautiful light coming through the leaves, and the leaves were still, and then I converted to black and white and it got better. And I was like, well, I'm going to take this one. So I'm not a purist. I'll work my way. I like the end result. And I'm not as picky as I used to be about how I get there. 

Speaker 3 (00:54:31):
And I do want to jump in and say that if you haven't been upstairs to see guys' photographs as part of the exhibition, they are stunning in person and this sort of projected image, just not do the real thing justice. 

Speaker 2 (00:54:43):
Well, you're very sweet. Thank you. Very kind. So that's why it's what makes my boogie s, it's what gets me excited when I see something rich. And it comes from having, when I first realized photography could be more than photography, and I lived a year in Connecticut with James Baker Hall, I was his apprentice, and we went to New York a lot, and I could go to the Museum of Modern Art and the Light gallery in the Witkin Gallery and to see prints by Edward Weston and Paul Cap Negro and Imogene Cunningham. And wow, when you see really rich black and white prints, it just made me want to produce prints like that. You're good at it too. It's like, do you like acoustic or electric? 

Speaker 8 (00:55:34):
We're going to make this our last question because I just heard that they're going to close the front door from security. The museum is closing for the night. It's eight night 

Speaker 2 (00:55:45):
At the museum. 

Speaker 8 (00:55:46):
Well, yeah, you can go out this door, but just to let you know that the front doors will be closing. So this will be our last question from the audience. A good question. Well, we got involved with the folks in Eastern Kentucky in Daniel's younger years, and we started going to a place, 

Speaker 2 (00:56:02):
This is my stepdad, Joseph Boone, everyone. 

Speaker 8 (00:56:04):
Okay. And so we started going to a little town called Fleming Neon, which is in Letcher County and Lynch, which were two mining towns there. And just the question is to ask you about the people of those towns, because here's what happened in Fleming Neon, they closed the city school in Fleming Neon, and they took a reclaimed mountaintop removal site, and they put the high school on the very top level, and they put the middle school on the second level of all this reclaimed painted area. And it was as if they said to the people of Letcher County, now don't ever forget, we own you and we're going to be in your face all the time. Because what we have done in Ravaging Your Land, every student, they merged all the schools. Every student has to come through and go to high school on this land where we have ravaged it. And every student that goes through has to see that. So my thought is for you, both of you, this has impacted the people in a big way. And for Daniel, of course, we have kind of a, the l and n doesn't stop here anymore, the song Gene Richey 

Speaker 2 (00:57:25):
Song. 

Speaker 8 (00:57:26):
Yeah, it's a great song that talks about what happens to the people. So talk about the people. 

Speaker 2 (00:57:32):
Well, I think building a school on abandoned basically stripped mine. Yeah, reclaimed is a very generous way to describe that land. Yeah. Harry Coll once told me, and I was working on, used to do some stringing or correspondent work for Newsweek, and they sent me for two weeks through the Coalfields about 1971, and I asked Harry Coll about reclamation, and he said, reclamation isn't worth a cup full of coal spit. And I was like, oh, I'll write that down. But to put a high school and another school there, it's kind of adding insult to injury. It's an extension of the, is hegemony the right word? I mean, the coal companies used to own the town. They owned the company store, they paid the people in script, which Bethlehem Coal, and it wasn't real money. And they totally controlled the lives of these little towns like Fleming, neon Wheelwright. 

Speaker 2 (00:58:31):
They were coal company towns owned lock, stock and barrel by companies in Pittsburgh and Houston, New York City, and who really only cared about the profit that they extracted. And it went back to the early 19 hundreds when this God, John CC Mayo and his wife rode through the mountains and she had a long dress with pockets in the skirt where she kept gold coins and they would find a mountain family and say, we will give you this gold coin for the mineral rights to your 50 or a hundred acres here. It was really pennies an acre. And it also gave them the right to tear the surface up to get to the minerals. And so I think there's still that kind of control of the region by the energy companies, even though it's waning because the industry is in decline and a lot of people have left. Younger people, especially back when there were slumps and coal industry, people went to Dayton and Michigan to get jobs by night. I worked by day, I worked the cars by night. I worked the bars. What was that? Bobby Bear, Detroit City. 

Speaker 2 (00:59:49):
So I think the disaster for the public in mountainous areas continues in terms of health problems, poor education, lack of money for retraining, for making it into a new commerce kind of place where miners can learn to code. And it's happening in pockets, but it's going to take more infrastructure and more, dare I say, government support. But there is this giant pool of money that can be drawn on if only some of the senators would agree to do that. And I don't understand why they have, because the money was put into a pool for just this kind of reason to help with reclamation, to help with post coal economy. 

Speaker 4 (01:00:46):
I'll just have one little nugget if we have time nugget. But that is to say that nine of the poorest 15 counties in the United States of America are in eastern Kentucky, and which 

Speaker 2 (01:01:00):
Is a couple hours that way. 

Speaker 4 (01:01:02):
Yeah. I mean, it's not far. And that's shocking when you think about the billions and billions and billions of dollars worth of material that has been taken out from the ground in those same counties. 

Speaker 2 (01:01:25):
The word rape. 

Speaker 4 (01:01:26):
Yeah, the rape 

Speaker 2 (01:01:27):
Of the environment comes to my theft. 

Speaker 4 (01:01:29):
Absolutely is alarming that the people who live in such wealth are surrounded by things that are modern world value, so highly would be so poor, and that we as a commonwealth in Kentucky, wouldn't be standing up for the citizens. That I think is one of the most shocking things about it. So yeah, the people are getting screwed. There's no other way to look at it. Their land is being destroyed and their health is being destroyed, and the severance taxes are minuscule and often 

Speaker 2 (01:02:20):
Unreachable for the communities. There's a man running for governor of West Virginia. Is it Justice? Is that his name? Oddly name, who owes millions in backed fines in Kentucky. 4 million, something like that. Yeah. Hasn't paid. And he wants to be the governor of West Virginia. And it's like, wait. Anyway. 

Speaker 3 (01:02:44):
Well, thank you both for the work that you have been doing, and thank you guy and Daniel for joining us this evening and for talking with us. Thank you very much. 

Speaker 1 (01:03:06):
Thank you for listening to Art Palace. We hope you'll be inspired to come visit the Cincinnati Art Museum and have conversations about the art yourself. General admission to the museum is always free, and we also offer free parking special exhibitions on view right now are Van Gogh into the Undergrowth Kentucky Renaissance, the Lexington Camera Club, and its community. 1954 through 1974, the book of only Enoch and the Jackleg Testament. Part one, Jack and Eve employed a staff art exhibition. A program that might interest you is Muse on Sunday, December 11th at 2:00 PM Muse is a live concert inspired by art that is presented by students from the College Conservatory of Music with a gallery discussion presented by a university art history student. For program reservations and more information, visit Cincinnati art museum.org. You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. Our theme song is Efron iCal by Baal. Hey, are you listening on an iPhone? Why not subscribe to our podcast on iTunes? And while you're at it, leave us a nice review too. I'm Russell Eig, and this has been Art Palace produced by the Cincinnati Art Museum.