Julia Clinker School of Visual Arts Julia Clinker’s grandfather went to work in the mines when he was eight years old. The coal industry defined his identity. It built and named the town he lived in. It employed the police, preacher, doctor and teacher. It held the rights to the land and established the governing order. The coal industry was king in West Virginia. Isolated in the mountains lived the miners who were the lifeblood of King Coal. When Clinker started photographing in West Virginia, she expected a terrain that would be void of the kind of industrial domination as had occurred in the past. But, with modern technology’s dependence on electricity churning up an insatiable hunger for more power, the coal industry has sped up the harvest of coal to triple the amount mined in 1978. Last year, the overall production was more than two billion tons. The industry is not a dinosaur of another era. American coal seams are rich enough to fuel the planet for another 250 years. It is the mountains of Appalachia, still the most fertile of the nation’s coal fields, that are being attacked with a savagery never before seen in the history of the industry. Keep Coming Back is a book about the conditions of contemporary mining communities in West Virginia.