(24" x 26") This view of the Bingham open pit copper mine in Utah shows the context for the following fourteen pictures–all made from the same hundred-square-foot patch of dirt at the pit's south rim.

The Bingham pictures are tied to the ASARCO project (the preceding portfolio) since, in 1903, Guggenheim Exploration Company (later ASARCO) financed the world's first important pit here. Its success seeded other mining and smelting ventures, from the Klondike to central Mexico and South America.

(60" x 16")

(60" x 18")

(60" x 18")

(60" x 16")

(24" x 35")

(35" x 24")

(35" x 24")

(35" x 24")

(24" x 35")

(35" x 24")

(24" x 24")

(35" x 24")

(60" x 24")

(24" x 35")

(Each panorama ca. 16"x 80") These two photographs, made nearly a quarter century apart from the same vantage point, show a landscape dramatically transformed. The mountain in the upper left of the top image, by 2012, had been removed. Crushed, pulverized and smelted for its copper, its remnant tailings fill the center of the lower image. Compare landmarks in the background of each photograph to appreciate the extent of alteration in the foreground.

(various to 30"x 90") This, and the other black and white Morenci images, were made on the same February day in 1989. Blasting in the pit accounts for varying degrees of clarity or obscurity due to rising dust. 

(various to 20"x 48") This panorama was shot a few minutes before the controlled blast, whose dust hangs in the atmosphere in the following picture.

(various to 20" x 48") 

(various to 21"x 90") 

(various to 20'x 80") 

(various to 24"x 86")

(24"x35") 

(24"x 35") Groundwater floods the pit, since its closure in the 1980s. Its toxicity is legend, with a copper content so high that it is economically "mined" with specially designed pumping and filtering equipment. 

(various to 12"x 45") Virginia City was built atop the legendary Comstock Lode, whose silver funded the Union army during the American Civil War. Adits, shafts, tailings and head frames still dot this historic landscape.   

(to 10' x 20") Square set timber bracing was a 19th century innovation first widely used on the Comstock. It required vast amounts of timber, but was efficient and greatly reduced tunnel collapses and casualties. Re-exposed to outside air after being sealed for more than a century, the timbers began immediately to oxidize, "burn" without flame, weaken, and give out.  

(to 20" x 30") This ingenious six-mile long tunnel drained excess groundwater from mine shafts 1,640 feet beneath Virginia City, diverting it to the Carson Valley near Dayton, Nevada.

(20"x 30") 

(to 18"x 27")

(to 10'x 40") 

(to 18"x 27") This icon, probably repaired often since the late 19th century, marked the small Jewish section of the Virginia City cemetery.

(to 24"x 72") The Comstock mining district is at the horizon; its domestic water supply is behind the camera, 1,300 feet higher than Virginia City. After 125 years, wooden flumes, iron tanks, rusting iron pipes and gravity still supply water to the town 21 miles from the intake.  

In this photo, Reno is at the far left; Lake Tahoe, thirty miles distant and 2,000 feet higher, is at the far right.

(to 12"x 48") This photo was made on the site of the 1867 Timothy H. O'Sullivan photograph.

(to 8"x 30") 

(to 9"x 50") Though not technically a mining site, I include this photo in UnEarth to acknowledge its place in a landscape shaped by extractive industry. These tufa pilars were formed beneath the waves of a vast lake which once dominated the Owens Valley. After Los Angeles diverted Sierra snowpack runoff, Mono Lake began to shrink. Its surface area and depth now resemble a mere puddle in a vast alkali basin.