In March 1984, miners at Cortonwood Colliery in Yorkshire walked out, and within six days Arthur Scargill, president of the NUM, had made the strike official across Britain. It became the UK’s biggest strike since the General Strike of 1926, running for almost a year until March 1985—a bitter conflict between the miners and Margaret Thatcher’s government that marked the end of the mining era in Britain. Michael Kerstgens was twenty-four and studying photography in Germany when it began. Born in Llanelli and spending his early years in South Wales, he had strong links to the region: his father had spent twelve years working in South Wales for an engineering company involved with the mining industry, and at sixteen Kerstgens took a summer job at the company’s Swansea office and experienced underground life at Cynheidre Colliery.
Once he heard about the strike, Kerstgens went to South Wales to find out what was going on and to start what would be his first major photographic project. Friends and contacts enabled him access to much that was closed off to the press. When he later moved on to Yorkshire, he lived with the family of a striking miner whose wife, Marsha Marshall, was one of the leading lights of Women Against Pit Closures (WAPC). He even met Arthur Scargill. The resulting photographs offer a powerful insight into a brutal strike that tore a rift through British society, entire mining communities, and even individual families.
Dewi Lewis Publishing issued the collection in hardback in 2024, at 210 by 270mm, with 152 pages and 87 duotone plates. The duotone reproduction gives the material a tonal weight closer to documentary craft, and the scale sits between intimate viewing and the demands of a sequence that holds a year’s slow attrition.
Michael Kerstgens has worked as a photographer and educator since 1986. In 2007 he became Professor of Documentary Photography at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences, and he was appointed to the German Photographic Association in 2006. He has received the Imke Folkerts Prize for Fine Art, a VG Bild-Kunst grant and the Rühr Prize for Art and Science, and has published six previous books. This collection returns to the work that began his career, made from inside a conflict he had a personal stake in. For collectors of postwar British documentary and its European observers, its value lies in that sustained proximity: a record of the strike as lived, assembled by someone who was not passing through.
