TITLE: Chilean last coal fighters

This series of photographs were taken between 2018 and 2020, when I witnessed the last labours of the ‘El Diezmo’ and ‘Trinidad’ coal mines, which ceased production in 2022, leaving 130 miners unemployed. This archive is a testimony of when the last lamp of coal mining in Lebu was extinguished.

AUTHOR: Alejandro Sotomayor (Chile)

His interest in telling stories through images arose around 1990 in Lebu, Chile, his hometown, after he bought his first camera, a Zenit 12XP. His first photographs were on the subject of the dying coal mining industry. In parallel to this, his passion for music led him to study Acoustic Engineering in Valdivia. There he also began photographing all kinds of concerts, musicians and instruments, which became a solo exhibition (Ritmographies ’97). It was in 1998 when he really dedicated himself full time to photography, after being hired by the newspaper El Mercurio as a photojournalist. During those years he developed his passion for portraits, and so in 2003 the photographic project “Faces of Work” emerged.

In order to learn from the exchange with other cultures, in 2014 he moved to Dublin, Ireland, where he worked as a photographer and web developer for RESPECT, an Irish charity that supports people with intellectual disabilities and autism; there he also worked for DOCTRID, a European research network. Back in Chile, he has focused mainly on portraying poverty, inequality and social injustice. He is also the founder and editor-in-chief of the photography magazine CAPTION Magazine.