Black Stone Burns constitutes a sustained visual and critical inquiry into the global coal industry and its enduring impact on communities, landscapes, and cultural imaginaries. Realized over a period of four years across three continents and five countries, the project situates itself at the intersection of documentary practice and visual anthropology. It opens with intimate family narratives and photographs from Olga Sokal’s hometown of Bełchatów in Poland, a site emblematic of the profound social and ecological transformations brought about by extraction. The trajectory then extends across the Atlantic to the United States, where the remnants of Appalachian coal towns reveal the dissonance between the mythologies of the American dream and the stark realities of extractivist capitalism. Here, constructed dioramas are juxtaposed with contemporary images, underscoring the tension between representation and lived experience. In the United Kingdom, Sokal interrogates the visual strategies through which coal has been promoted and naturalized, both historically and in the present. Archival advertisements are set against contemporary campaigns that seek to greenwash the country’s fraught entanglement with poverty, industry, and the black stone. The project culminates in China, within the vastness of its coal mines, where the scale of extraction embodies both the ambitions of industrial modernity and the devastating consequences of environmental degradation. Through these interconnected geographies, Black Stone Burns articulates a visual archaeology of coal, exposing its entanglement with memory, ideology, and ecological crisis.