TITLE: Archaeologists

This series of photographs documents archaeologists working in the field in West Virginia. I began this series at the request of one of the subjects, who wanted photos to show his parents so they could better understand what he did. I ended up photographing most of the crew working on that particular project. I chose black and white for these portraits for a variety of aesthetic reasons. I think the starkness of the black and white captured the bleakness of a rainy, muddy winter in West Virginia. On a more banal level, the high-visibility clothing that most crew members wore distracted from the faces, I thought, and rendering the image in black and white helped minimize that distraction. Although I think of these as portraits, I tried to capture people as they did what they normally do during the workday. So, I have people shoveling, troweling, and drawing. One image of a woman resting momentarily is the most like a traditional portrait, but even that captures her during a typical day of work.

AUTHOR: Christopher Begley (United States)

I am an archaeologist and journalist from Kentucky. I completed my Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago, and have conducted archaeological research in Honduras, El Salvador, Bolivia, Albania, Montenegro, Croatia, Greece, Italy, and Tanzania. I now focus on maritime (underwater) archaeology, looking at shipwrecks in Central America, the Mediterranean, and in east Africa. I was a Fulbright Scholar to El Salvador, a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow, and am a National Geographic Explorer. My recent book ‘The Next Apocalypse’ (Basic Books, 2021) looks at how societies collapse, our current fascination with apocalyptic stories, and what that says about us.

I also work as a journalist, producing and reporting for WEKU fm, an NPR station that serves central and eastern Kentucky. Most recently, I worked on the documentary series ‘Rise,’ focusing on Appalachian Kentucky (www.weku-rise.org). My interest in photography started as I took photos for the website accompanying our radio series. So, I take photographs for the radio.

The series submitted here is of archaeologists I worked with in West Virginia and Kentucky.