For this exhibition, the first ever held at the 1883 North London Mining Office, photographer John Forney is showing photographs of historic mining sites in Colorado, including several images of the North London Mill site. Forney employs a large-format camera that produces 8”x10” negatives. These are then laid directly upon traditional sliver bromide black & white photographic paper and exposed to light. This traditional – now historic – photographic process is similar to the then revolutionary technology available in the late 1800’s when the North London Mining Company was developed and active. The silver used for the photographic process is indeed derived from the mining industry. Forney has been visiting the NoLo site for many years to photograph the Mill.

In these photographs of the North London Mill, Forney documents the ruins – what remains – of the historic building, paradoxically, before the Mill is further stabilized and rehabilitated by NoLo. 

Ruins embody the processes of time – of gravity, climate, water, wind, erosion, and neglect. Ruins are creation and construction in reverse. Nineteenth-Century Romanticism, with its emphasis on the aesthetics of the sublime as posited by philosophers such as Kant and Burke, often turned to ruins (especially Greco-Roman ruins) as well as to the Alps (and later, on this continent, to the Rocky Mountains in the work of artists such as Bierstadt and Moran) for subject matter. As Edmund Burke writes in 1757 in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful:

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience.

The feeling of the sublime, as opposed to that of the beautiful, is evoked by the overwhelming, the destructive, the vast, and the terrifying. Ruins evoke these feelings through their foregrounding of the processes of loss, disorder, and decay. Ruins are markers of the inevitable victory of entropy. Of course, this is at odds with NoLo’s mission to preserve. We are keenly aware of the paradox.

 – Jeff Crane, Executive Co-Director, NoLo

This exhibition has been made possible thanks to generous funding from The Summit Foundation, Park County Creative Alliance, and South Park National Heritage Area.