The A Thousand Little Cuts Online Print Auction features signed prints from six Pulitzer Prize winners, five National Geographic photographers, six Photographers of the Year (POYi and NPPA), two Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award winners, one Guggenheim Fellow, and many legends of contemporary documentary photography. A few of the photographers you’ll find include: Ed Kashi, David LaBelle, Carolyn Cole, Stephanie Sinclair, Liz O. Baylen, Bob Sacha, Matt Eich, Scott Strazzante, Alex Harris and Barbara Davidson. Thirty-eight photographers have come together to support the documentary, A Thousand Little Cuts: a film exploring the grassroots movement to stop the highly-destructive mining process of mountaintop removal.
In a forgotten part of our country, coal feeds families when not much else does. There’s no easy way to take sides when the coal company that takes your land and destroys your streams also pays your electric bills and puts food on the table. That’s why speaking out for the first time was the hardest thing Lorelei Scarbro had ever done.
Lorelei, the main character of A Thousand Little Cuts, is a tenacious grandmother fighting to save one of the last untouched mountains in Appalachia.
Lorelei simply wanted to tend her garden, paint ceramic angels and spoil her grandchildren. She wanted to live out her days at home — the rolling mountains of West Virginia. Then bulldozers came, followed by blasting crews. Massey Energy was gearing up for a mountaintop removal operation on Coal River Mountain, the mountain Lorelei calls home. In 2007 Lorelei spoke out. “This isn’t coal mining,” she yelled at a permit hearing. “This is the rape of Appalachia!”
In A Thousand Little Cuts, Emmy-winning director Chad A. Stevens takes us on the journey with Lorelei as she fights Big Coal to protect her community from an encroaching 6,500-acre mountaintop removal mine and proposes a positive community solution: the first green-energy project in the region, a 220-turbine industrial wind farm.
After political lobbying and civil disobedience fail to create tangible change, Lorelei opens a community center in the heart of a struggling coal town. The center brings locals together, even those on opposite sides of the mountaintop removal debate. The cumulative effect of her efforts grows exponentially as she finds opportunities for solutions – unifying a fractured community and supporting an evolving local economy. It’s a story of change: a transforming culture, a dividing community, an awakening individual, and a family hanging in the balance.
Find out more about the project at the A Thousand Little Cuts website.
Browse through award-winning photographs in the print auction, buy a print and support the film at the A Thousand Little Cuts Online Print Auction.