This 15-year-old trapper boy named Vance worked for several years in a coal mine, where he was paid 75 cents a day for 10 hours work, which consisted solely of opening and shutting this door. Most of the time, he waited idly for cars to come – makes one rethink our relationship with hurrying and waiting, to say nothing of putting in radical perspective our present-day complaints about how hard it is to find fulfilling work and reminding us that notions like “letting your life speak” and “finding your bliss” are a decidedly modern privilege.
I found this 1908 photograph by Lewis Wickes Hine, serendipitously, while trawling the Library of Congress public domain archive for something else. Due to the intense darkness inside the mine, the writing on the door was not visible until Hine developed the plate in his darkroom.