Rogovin photographed the miners of Appalachia for twenty years from the 1960s. In the 1980s he received the W. Eugene Smith Award to extend his work to Europe, Asia, South Africa, China, Mexico and Cuba. The photographs are presented as pairs, showing the men at work and at home, to give an idea of his subjects in society, beyond their function as workers. The series, known as ‘The Family of Miners’, bears a deliberate reference to the international sympathies of the exhibition, ‘The Family of Man’, staged by Edward Steichen at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1955, where photography was grouped around universal themes of human experience. The extremely dark tones of this photograph are broken only by the flash of whites of the men’s eyes and the hard hat of the figure on the left.