This online edition explores the life and work of a remarkable documentary photographer, George Harvan of Lansford, Pennsylvania. The son of a Slovak-born miner, Harvan has recorded over a fifty-year period the work and community life of the last generation of underground miners in the anthracite region of northeastern Pennsylvania. His work is well-known and well-respected in that region but has not received the broader recognition that it merits.

This edition employs varied resources to bring the photographic work of George Harvan to a wider audience. Central to an appreciation of Harvan's work is a major retrospective exhibition drawing on more than 280 photographs that he shot between 1946 and 1999. Organized in roughly chronological order, the exhibition brings together for the first time the full range of Harvan's work, from his first professional photographs shot in occupied Japan, through his extensive documentation of underground mining in the Panther Valley, to more recent experimental work with Polaroid and pinhole photography. The photographs themselves are complemented by text and audio clips drawn from oral interviews in which George Harvan reflects upon his life and explains his goals and techniques as a documentary photographer and artist.

For viewers and readers particularly interested in Harvan's life and the process through which he came to document the life and work of the Pennsylvania's anthracite region, the edition includes the text and substantial audio excerpts of a series of five interviews with George Harvan conducted between May 1997 and January 1998. In that context George Harvan describes his upbringing in the mining town of Lansford, Pennsylvania, his coming to documentary photography while in the service in World War II, and his fifty-year career following his return to Lansford in 1947. The edited transcripts contain Harvan family photographs and are linked to groups of his own photographs that he discusses in the course of the interviews. And for those interested in listening to the original interviews, there are links to substantial audio segments of the original recordings of the interviews.

Finally, we offer a biographical and analytical essay that explores Harvan's work and life and places both within a broader historical and photographic context. There we examine the ways in which Harvan's documentary photography shows the influence of currents in the broader cultural history of the nation and yet at the same time reflects faithfully elements of the local ethnic and regional culture from which it emerged. This essay, like the edition as a whole, draws heavily on visual and oral evidence, taking full advantage of the multimedia sources in presenting its case.

Viewers and readers thus have three overlapping avenues through which to explore the life and work of George Harvan: an exhibition, an oral history, and a critical essay. Each route offers entry points into the rich array of visual, oral, and textual resources that we have assembled on this online edition. Each, we trust, takes advantage of the rich possibilities for multimedia history offered by the worldwide web and online publishing. We are grateful to The Journal of MultiMedia History for making it possible to bring George Harvan's story to a broader public. His work speaks to the resilience and dignity of men and women living hard lives in a region hit by catastrophic economic decline; at the same time this body of work speaks to one man's quest to present that human resilience and dignity to a wider audience. Harvan's remarkable artistic success speaks at once to the broader human condition and reveals the best of human possibilities. Repeatedly Harvan turned down professional opportunities that would have steered him away from his roots in the anthracite region. In so doing, he found ample opportunities for professional growth and artistic expression and created a unique photographic record for which we are deeply in his debt. Join with us in exploring this record; we are confident that you will ultimately be awed by the vision of this most modest of men.