Black Stone Burns began in Bełchatów, the Polish town where Olga Sokal grew up beside one of Europe’s largest open-pit lignite mines. From that intimate starting point — family stories, family pictures — the project expands outward over four years and across three continents, following coal through Poland, the Appalachian coalfields of the United States, the United Kingdom, and China. Published by Fw:Books in 2025 as a 168-page softcover, the book brings Sokal’s photographs into dialogue with archival imagery, and its ambition is global without ever becoming abstract.
Sokal’s method is collage in the broadest sense. Documentary photographs of mining towns and the people who live in them are set against archival coal advertising and against contemporary corporate commercials that recast the industry in greener terms. In the American section, images of dioramas are placed beside the harder evidence of extractive capitalism; in the British material, historical advertisements meet the current rhetoric that smooths over a fraught record of coal and poverty. Coal is treated here not only as a substance but as a narrative — one that has been promoted, sold, and periodically rewritten.
The sequence moves from the familial to the geopolitical, and that movement is the book’s real subject: how an industry shapes economies, communities, and identities, and how those transformations register in ordinary lives. The closing section on the vast mines of China, and the environmental degradation that accompanies extraction on such a scale, gives the project its widest frame. Sokal does not moralize; she arranges evidence so that continuities between places become visible.
For a collector, the interest lies in the book’s structure as much as its reporting. The juxtaposition of archival and contemporary promotional imagery with Sokal’s own photographs is a considered visual argument, and the physical format — 22 × 28 cm, generous enough for the dioramas and landscapes alike — supports it. Fw:Books is a small Amsterdam publisher with a reputation for precise, idea-led photobooks, and this is a substantial, long-gestated project from a photographer whose work has already been shown in exhibition form. It is a book about how images are used to sell extraction, made by someone who uses images to examine it.
