#181 CAMERA Book Review: Alan Gignoux - Mountaintops to Moonscapes

Mountaintops to Moonscapes is a handmade photobook in which photographer Alan Gignoux documents the ruinous impact of mountaintop removal mining on the Appalachian region and its people.

Mountaintops to Moonscapes comprises a large-format book with a slip-sleeve, hand-bound in multiple parts, and a booklet in which origami folding techniques are used to express the violence being done to the Appalachian landscape.

Alan Gignoux's Mountaintops to Moonscapes documents the environmental and social consequences of mountaintop removal mining across the Appalachian region of the United States. Produced over several years and published as a hand bound edition of one hundred copies in 2021, the project examines a method of coal extraction in which the summits of mountains are blasted away to expose coal seams beneath the surface. Gignoux photographs the altered landscape alongside the communities whose lives and livelihoods have been shaped by the coal industry, presenting the environmental impact of extraction within its wider economic and cultural context. The project was conceived as a companion volume to his earlier work Oil Sands and combines documentary photography with an innovative book design developed in collaboration with Stanley James Press.

The book's physical structure forms an integral part of the narrative. Multiple hand bound sections unfold to reveal increasingly expansive landscapes before culminating in a single panoramic image of a mountain transformed by mining. An accompanying booklet contains essays, interviews and an origami foldout that physically represents the explosive process used in mountaintop removal. Rather than presenting the landscape as either untouched wilderness or industrial terrain, Gignoux explores the complex relationship between environmental destruction, energy production and the communities that have depended upon mining for generations. Mountaintops to Moonscapes demonstrates how the design of a photobook can extend the documentary process, using sequence, structure and material form to deepen the viewer's understanding of one of the most contested landscapes in contemporary America.

Designed by Emily Macaulay and Chloe Juno

Published by Stanley James Press
Edition of 100
Softcover with card slipcase
56 pages in the larger book and a small 12-page booklet
350 x 255mm

Alan Gignoux

Stanley James Press

Chloe Juno

Music by kind permission Martin Stephenson:

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