Ben Russell on Good Luck

Abstract

Ben Russell’s Good Luck (2018), a feature about miners working in two very different mining operations—an underground copper mine Serbia, an open-pit gold mine in Suriname—immerses the viewer within two forms of difficult labor and the visual/auditory spaces within which this labor takes place. Good Luck is made up of imagery of the miners at work and of intimate silent, hand-processed portraits of individual workers. Though the two forms of mining occur in very distant locations and very different climates, Russell’s diptych creates a series of echoes between the two groups of miners. And Russell has described himself as working between ethnography and psychedelia, a diptych of concerns that combines an exploration of how the miners and mining activities look and how surreal they can seem.