Louie Palu is a Globe and Mail photographer based in Toronto. The photographs in this exhibition are a small selection from the thousands of images he made between 1991 and 2003 in the mines and mining towns of Northern Ontario and Western Quebec.

These images relate to a photographic tradition pioneered by Leslie Sheddon in Nova Scotia, Russell Lee in West Virginia, Bill Brandt in Wales, and Sebastiao Salgado in his more recent images of South American miners. Palu's mining project also has strong links with Steve McQueen's video Western Deep, shot in a South African gold mine.

Many of the mines Palu has photographed were developed by Teck Corporation (now Teck Cominco), after which this gallery space is named in honour of Teck's support of the Vancouver campus of Simon Fraser University.