January 2025 Highlight: Alfonso Iannelli
(American, 1919-1988)
Kentucky Coal Miner series
34 silver gelatin prints, 1946
Gift of George Lambert
This month we highlight a recent gift of 34 photographs of Kentucky coal miners by the American photographer Alfonso “Fons” Iannelli (1919-1988). Some of these pictures were published in the March 1947 issue of Ladies Home Journal alongside an article by Betty Hannah Hoffman titled “Meet a Soft-Coal Miner’s Family of Harlan County, Kentucky.” Iannelli’s rigorous documentary images depict the impoverished family of coal miner Jim Perkins. After working in the Yocum Creek Coal Company mine in Harlan, Kentucky, for 42 years, Perkins, his wife, and seven children still lived in a dilapidated shack without running water. Striking for its stark portrayal of the hardships of coal mining in the postwar era, this article was part of an extraordinary series of photo essays on everyday life titled “How America Lives,” which ran in Ladies Home Journal from February 1940 through the 1960s. Modeled on European worker photography, which documented in detail the daily lives of laborers, this series, initiated by editor Mary Bass, was much broader in scope, covering, as the initial proposal stated, “All income groups, from the $1,000-a-year farmer to the $25,000-a-year city big shot.” Fons Iannelli was an acclaimed photojournalist who worked during World War II with Edward Steichen’s notable Naval Aviation Photographic Unit. After the war, Iannelli was a prominent photographer for many so-called women’s magazines, including Ladies Home Journal, McCalls, and The Saturday Evening Post, as well as Life and Fortune.
