Les gueules noires
Black faces
This is how the miners were called because of their faces often covered by coal dust after a day's work underground... But why do the decent in these mines? And why do all those people from other country's want to get black too. Certain because they want to feed there empty faces, there faces full hoop for a better world...hoop which disappears quickly.
Those men and there families came here to fill an emptiness, a black hole, a missing, simply to live, the motive of their journey was to survive.
The black faces of rubber symbolize the eagerness of the struggle, they don't ask to consume the coal, and so consume live.
The image of a happy miner[ real postcard which colored from a bygone area ]. The aim in this setting is to show happiness...to be able to work. For an artist working is certainly happiness, what a miner concerns I doubt it.
This image, reduced in black and white wrinkled, is struggling for light, but little by little is transformed into bits of coal....