Join photographers Darek Fortas and David Severn and explore highlights of the MPF collection, with a focus on coal mining. This tour will be lead by the MPF archivist, Isaac Blease.

On this tour we’ll take a look at material from the print collection, the ephemera collection and the MPF library, covering artists such as Chris Killip, Colin Jones, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Janine Wiedel and David Hurn, among many more.

Darek and David are exhibiting as a part of the current MPF exhibition, Intersectional Geographies, and will give an informal talk about their practice after the archive tour, followed by a discussion.

Darek Fortas is exhibiting work from Coal Story, an archival and photographic survey of two of the largest coal mining companies in the EU, located in Silesia, the most industrialised part of Poland where Darek Fortas was born. This project considers the role of the coal industry in toppling the communist regime in Poland.

David Severn is exhibiting Thanks Maggie and The Pits of Nations: Black British Coal Miners. Thanks Maggie is a visual autobiography exploring a mining community in Nottinghamshire, where he was born and grew up. The Pits of Nations: Black British Coal Miners was commissioned by Norma Gregory to explore and give voice to representations of black miners’ stories in the UK.