photo essay about mining

• PHOTOGRAPHY

Peter Essick’s Journey into Environmental Photojournalism

As both a picture and environment editor at National Geographic I live a hybrid life. On one hand I try to imagine how we can visualize—in fresh and compelling ways—the goings-on in our world for the stories we publish. On the other hand I’m deeply involved in conceiving and helping create many of our projects about global environmental change. I thrive where these two spheres intersect.

This intersection might best be described as “environmental photojournalism”—a combination of documentary photojournalism and environmental journalism. It’s a two-fold discipline inspired and informed by scientists who study patterns of change on our planet, largely brought about by humanity’s expanding presence. It also encompasses the finest traditions of world-class documentary photography—trying to eloquently make visual sense of our world so readers can better understand how to find their own place in it.

Among the most memorable environmental photojournalism projects I’ve been involved with have been collaborations with photographer Peter Essick. We first teamed up nearly 20 years ago on a project about non-point source water pollution —the kind that flows into rivers, bays, and the sea from fertilized lawns, farms, paved highways, and parking lots. This diffuse runoff pollution contributes to “hypoxic” or dead zones like those we find in the Chesapeake Bay, and the Gulf of Mexico near the Mississippi River delta.

Since that first story, Peter and I have traveled the road of environmental photojournalism together, teaming on 14 stories with subjects as diverse as nuclear waste, paleoclimatology, America’s wilderness, and the chemical pollution cocktail we each carry inside us .   We collaborated on a 74-page climate change project in September 2004, and in 2010 we explored Greenland as it “greens up” in the face of rising global temperatures.

In 2009 Peter created a powerful photo essay on the impact of tar (or oil) sands mining in Alberta , and he recently photographed a beautiful black and white essay on the Ansel Adams Wilderness of California . He is incredibly versatile.

Peter has just released a new book called “Our Beautiful, Fragile World” —a retrospective of his 25 years as a photographer who’s been deeply engrossed in documenting the resilience of the natural world at the nexus of increasing encroachment and impact from expanding human activity.

I recently interviewed Peter about his origins and trajectory as an environmental photographer:

FREE BONUS ISSUE

DENNIS DIMICK: You were a business major in college, then went to graduate school at Missouri for photojournalism. How did you get interested in photography?

PETER ESSICK: My father was a science teacher and a lover of the outdoors. We went on a lot of trips, hiking, skiing, river rafting when I was growing up and he always took pictures with his trusty Nikon F to show his classes. So my father taught me how to use a camera, but it wasn’t until I took a photography class in high school that I really fell in love with the medium.

DENNIS: Who are your inspirations? Photographically? Environmentally?

PETER: Ansel Adams was my biggest inspiration starting out. I learned much of what I still know from his Basic Photo series. I also liked Eliot Porter for his color work. I admire many contemporary photographers who are pushing boundaries in the digital era. However, I still find myself drawn to photographs that are timeless, and the understated work of photographers like Robert Adams or Atget.

My father used to quote John Muir a lot. I inherited a complete set of Muir’s writings from him, and I have read many of the classic thinkers on wilderness, from Aldo Leopold to Edward Abbey. Finding Beauty in a Broken World   by Terry Tempest Williams is sort of my guiding light for what a good environmental photograph should be.

DENNIS: People are always interested in finding out how photographers are able to get assignments from National Geographic . How did you make your connection?

PETER: When I was at the University of Missouri I was selected as a summer intern based on a portfolio I had submitted. It was how I got my foot in the door and I am still very thankful that   National Geographic gave me that opportunity. It was truly life changing in every way.

DENNIS: Was there an event or situation that caused you to focus on environmental issues?

PETER: The assignment I did for a National Geographic special issue on water in 1993 was my first exposure to photographing an important environmental issue. I found I liked the intellectual challenge and the work seemed worthwhile beyond just the artistic value.

DENNIS: What have been your favorite or most rewarding projects?

PETER: My favorite place of any that I have visited is Patagonia in the southern part of Argentina and Chile. The high desert, blue lakes, dramatic peaks of the Andes and the amazing clouds and weather are all a dream for a landscape photographer. The gauchos are also great subjects. Close runner-ups would be the Ansel Adams Wilderness, California, and Yoho National Park, British Columbia.

Overall, the most rewarding story I have done is about climate change in 2004. That is one I can look back on and feel good that I was able to do that story. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. As Yogi Berra would say, those don’t come along too often.

“My best motivation to do environmental stories is when I see children like the boy looking out the window in Butte and wonder about the world we are leaving for them.” —Peter Essick

You May Also Like

Nat Geo's most compelling images of the 21st century (so far)

Conversation With Abelardo Morell and Peter Essick

How much does your name influence your future? The data may surprise you.

DENNIS: How about most challenging? The first project you and I did together was on non-point source water pollution, and just this year you took a new look at the impacts of fertilizer —an important aspect in the original story. We also did a project on “toxic people” —or the chemical pollution inside us, and then there was nuclear waste. None of those projects were easy, right?

PETER: In general, environmental stories are more difficult than landscape stories because of problems getting access to sites and finding people who will agree to be photographed. On the positive side, I found it exciting to work on a story like non-point source water pollution because it had never been done before and there were no other past stories to live up to. Stories on pollution or waste I find fascinating for the dystopian elements, and they usually have visual potential, too.

DENNIS: What did you learn about yourself and your work while editing this book and reviewing the photographs?

PETER: I feel I have a unique story to tell with this book. When I have been able to break through all the noise to try to be heard, I have been getting a good response. The combination of a photojournalist and environmentalist seems like a logical one, but it really isn’t all that common. I learned how to write about my photographs doing this book.

I often walk up Stone Mountain near my home in Georgia for exercise, and I found I got a lot of ideas while walking up and down the trail.

“Many of my successful photographs are the result of discovering a scene and then going back several times to get the best picture possible. This photograph is the result of having an idea and then executing it despite the obstacles.” —Peter Essick

DENNIS: What do you tell young photographers who come to you interested in pursuing the kind of work you have done?

PETER: Many people contact me saying they are interested in becoming a National Geographic photographer and I have taught many workshops on nature photography. However, very few young photographers seem as interested in doing environmental stories. I feel going forward we will need more photographers doing this work, and that is one of the reasons that I produced this book.

DENNIS: What kinds of projects would you like to do that you have not had a chance to pursue? Or put another way, what’s next for Peter?

PETER: This book and one coming out in the spring on the Ansel Adams Wilderness have opened up a lot of opportunities for me. I am doing lots of lectures, workshops, some exhibits. And I’m planning to keep making new nature and environmental photographs. I recently bought an Ebony view camera and have been using it to make 4×5 collodion wet plates. The images seem to have a lot of potential to evoke a passage of time that is unique to the process. In many ways, it feels like now I am reaching back to look forward.

Peter Essick’s new book, “Our Beautiful, Fragile World” is published by Rocky Nook Books. See more work on his website and follow him on Twitter and Instagram .

Dennis Dimick can be found on Flickr , Twitter , and Instagram .

Related Topics

• PHOTOJOURNALISM
• ENVIRONMENT AND CONSERVATION

Why it’s important to tell stories that inspire action, not despair

A strike threatened to cripple Hollywood in 1960. Here's how they resolved it.

The window into Leonardo da Vinci's creativity? His sketchbooks

‘Urgency culture’ might lead you to burnout. How can you combat it?

The most dangerous job on Earth? Inside the world of underwater welders

• Environment
• Perpetual Planet
• History & Culture

History & Culture

• History Magazine
• Mind, Body, Wonder
• Paid Content
• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy
• Your US State Privacy Rights
• Children's Online Privacy Policy
• Interest-Based Ads
• About Nielsen Measurement
• Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information
• Nat Geo Home
• Attend a Live Event
• Book a Trip
• Inspire Your Kids
• Shop Nat Geo
• Visit the D.C. Museum
• Learn About Our Impact
• Support Our Mission
• Advertise With Us
• Customer Service
• Renew Subscription
• Manage Your Subscription
• Work at Nat Geo
• Sign Up for Our Newsletters
• Contribute to Protect the Planet

Copyright © 1996-2015 National Geographic Society Copyright © 2015-2024 National Geographic Partners, LLC. All rights reserved

• Join the SCA
• Cultural Anthropology

Editors’ Forum Writing with Light

Corpus: Mining the Border

By Daniel Hoffman

November 12, 2012

Cite As: Hoffman, Daniel. 2014. "Corpus: Mining the Border." Photo Essays, Cultural Anthropology website, January 31. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/corpus-mining-the-border

• Share on Facebook
• Share on Twitter
• Share via Email

Editors’ Introduction

In 2010, a conversation was ignited over incorporating photo essays into the new Cultural Anthropology website. The conversation, which started about a photo essay project, quickly transformed into a discussion about disciplinary boundaries, peer review, and new directions in anthropology. With the understanding that so many anthropologists are engaged in alternative forms of critical ethnographic expression and thought came the realization that it was time for renewed discussion about content and aesthetics as well as procedure and review.

It is with great pleasure, then, that we introduce our first photo essay, by Daniel Hoffman. In this inaugural essay our goal was to present an aesthetically and intellectually powerful piece of work and to spur provocative conversation. Our goal was to facilitate a conversation about the medium and the message; to do so, we felt we needed to press the boundaries and ask our contributor and reviewers to reset the stage of peer review. They all graciously agreed to do so. The result is that we have a stunning essay presented with “open” peer reviews.

By choosing an open peer review process we mean to perform a critical engagement with the photos, while also instigating a discussion between author and reviewers, as well as author, reviewers, and audience. This would produce a different reviewing and viewing process while facilitating new conversations about ethnography and representation. It would also be to further ask: What is the intent of peer review? And what can we do differently with this process (and this medium)? Our two reviewers, Zeynep Gürsel and Alan Klima, generously agreed to have their comments made public in service of starting the dialogue.

We believe this first photo essay sets a high bar for the potentialities of visual anthropology. Our hope is that it will lead to further discussions: on photography, the role of art and media in anthropology, and also the process and practice of peer review for these representative modes of ethnographic work. It is meant to be an invitation and a provocation. While future photo essays will not necessarily engage in an open peer review process, we hope to continue a dialogue about the practice of visual anthropology and what counts as scholarly practice.

Michelle Stewart and Vivian Choi

Download “ Corpus: Mining the Border ” by Daniel Hoffman as a pdf booklet.

Photo Essay

So I resolved to start my inquiry with no more than a few photographs . . . Nothing to do with a corpus: just some bodies. –Roland Barthes

The sounds on the mines around Mayengema are scratchy, percussive sounds. Sounds of scraping, shaking and digging. These are sounds of destruction. Over them float the voices of miners and bosses. Male voices, sometimes singing, but more often bantering, arguing, or cursing. The diamonds they search for make no sounds that distinguish them from the gravel, mud, and water of the mine.

The Mayengema mines seem somehow to exist in a low visual register as well. The mud of the rainforest floor and the dense vegetation that surround the pits are monochrome yellows and greens. The tools of alluvial or surface mining are spare and symmetrical: hand shovels, troughs and screens. Gravel from the bottom of the pits is maddeningly uniform. The bodies of the miners are stripped to their essence by hard repetitive work and the hard repetitive landscape.

The village of Mayengema lies on the Moro River near the Sierra Leone–Liberia border. It is some fifteen miles from the nearest road, which is itself only passable in the dry season and then only by motorbike. The cataracts on the Moro River make it impassable by boat, so what comes and goes from Mayengema comes and goes by foot.

In the past two years thousands of young men have made the trip to Mayengema and to other small settlements throughout the Gola Forest. The more established and accessible diamond fields to the north and west have become crowded and dangerous. The rapaciousness with which they were mined during Sierra Leone’s war has convinced many that the fields are virtually tapped out. Too many authorities claim ownership over the sites, and there is close scrutiny of who goes in and what comes out. These Gola Forest deposits, by contrast, are harder to access and thus potentially more rewarding. They hold the promise of virgin territory and less competition for young men willing or desperate enough to leave everything else behind.

Much of the mining workforce in the forest pits is made up of ex-combatants from fighting factions on both sides of the border. Fighters I knew from Sierra Leone’s Civil Defense Force and from Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy followed the rumors of rich new diamond deposits ever deeper into the forest. Along with their former adversaries from the Sierra Leone army, the Revolutionary United Front and the National Patriotic Front of Liberia they moved in small groups of two to a dozen. Often these same units fought together during the war; then as now they blur the distinction between a labor crew and a militia squad. For two decades and more many of these men have cycled through the region’s urban and rural battle zones, political campaigns, and gold and diamond mines. They follow rumors of work or are sent on the orders of patrons with the authority to control their labor. They transit networks of friends and contacts and rarely remain situated long. They arrive and depart as strangers.

In early 2010 I visited Mayengema and other borderland mining sites as part of an ongoing ethnography of the mobilization and militancy of young men’s labor in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Much of my research charts the ways in which this particular West African warscape is organized around the efficient assembly and deployment of young men and their physical capacities, especially their capacity for violence (see Hoffman 2007a, 2011a, 2011b). It is a political economy that has reshaped the meanings of patrimonialism and military command, and reshaped the meanings of youth and male sociality. It is a political economy that refigures the very spaces of the city and the occult imaginary. What has been striking is the interchangeability of spheres of work, the qualitative similarity for many young men between the tasks and rewards of war fighting and the tasks and rewards of mining, campaigning, or tapping rubber. Having elsewhere explored the macro processes that made these young men available to forces larger than themselves, I came to Mayengema and the Gola Forest to chart these processes at the level of the material bodies of young men. The resulting photo essay is an ethnographic portrait of the shape and texture of work.

Labors of the Body

Work on the mines is sisyphean. Diamonds are carried across this landscape by century after century of moving water and shifting earth. One accesses them by panning creeks and river floors or by scrapping away the topsoil. The first step, then, is to alter the earth: divert the course of waterways if possible, or peel back two, ten or twenty feet of the forest floor. This is deconstructive labor measured by the shovelful. Mining plots are made by transforming the forest into a clear-cut moonscape, pit after pit separated by towering piles of discarded earth, sand and stone, all dug by hand.

The exposed sand and gravel must then be washed and sifted. The pits are flooded. Hand held screens allow the miners to pass dirt and water through, trapping larger objects at the top. Next the centripetal forces of rapid rotation separate generic stones from the heavier diamonds. The miners stand in the flooded pits or flowing waterways and they bend and sift for hours while a comrade loads shovel after shovel of sand and gravel. The miner shakes his screen, running his hands through the top course of stone left on the sifter and tossing the lighter, worthless stones back into the pit. Once a volume of heavier stone has settled on the bottom of the sifter, he and the rest of the crew will gather. Together they carefully pick through the small pile, looking for oddly shaped and colored bits of wealth amid the debris.

The work is always hot and always hard. As the number of pits grows and the forest canopy disappears the miners place palm fronds around the pit to make shade. In the dry season the bodies of the workers are parched from the waist up, water logged from the waist down, but the work goes quickly. In the long wet season everything is soaked and much of what the miners’ shovels pull out the rainwater immediately puts back in.

When the small pile does unearth stones of value, these stones begin to traverse a complex and varied web of relations. Much depends on the arrangements that brought the miners here and on the personalities and predilections of everyone involved. Typically, the crew has a boss. He might be slightly older than the other miners, perhaps once a low-level commander at the battlefront or a team captain on the campaign trail. In some cases he is entirely beholden to a patron, a more powerful figure who pays for the crews’ equipment and transport to the mines and who provides them with a single, simple meal a day. In some cases the crew boss himself acts as patron, though the fact that he is here in the muddy pits means he is not wealthy enough to deploy the labors of others.

Through the boss the crew is bound to other links in this chain. These include the landowner holding title over the plot, the local representative of the Ministry of Mines, the holder of the mining permit, who may or may not be the landowner and may or may not be the patron and may or may not be the crew boss. Every one of these is a stakeholder in the operation and ultimately in the small pile of stone. Depending on their level of trust in one another and the quality of the gem, they might all go together to a makeshift diamond purchase office in the village or town closest to the mine. They might travel collectively to Zimmi or Kenema, towns with multiple buyers and higher prices. If the level of trust is high or the crew is inexperienced or can’t afford the trip to town, the boss might simply sell the stone to his patron for a fraction of its value. Periodically a miner or an entire crew will slip away in the night, leaving everyone to suspect that something of real value was pulled from the ground and the diamond is headed for Freetown or Monrovia, the miners having made the calculus of risk and reward and decided in favor of flight.

Many of the thousands of miners who have moved into this forest live at the pits in makeshift camps. They supplement the meager provisions of their patrons with what they can glean from the forest or barter from nearby villages. Others pack tight in the small huts of forest communities, paying a minimal rent that is often transacted in labor rather than cash. There are larger towns at the edge of the forest, towns like Mano River Kongo on the Liberia side that are close enough to the forest pits that the men travel there and back daily, though this means long treks on difficult forest paths. These towns are swollen with men. For Mano River Kongo it is not the first time. This was once a major site for the excavation of iron ore, until a mudslide in the early 1980s destroyed much of the settlement. The American ore company quickly departed, leaving what remained of Mano River Kongo to wither and die. Now, six months after a major diamond find just outside town, the population of Mano River Kongo is equal to what it once was, but it is hardly a thriving community. There is a notable lack of children or old men, and very few women of any age. It is a town of male youth, and they squat in the ruins of the school, in tents pitched between old houses, in a half built mosque. For entertainment they play soccer, smoke, and drink tea. All of this takes place in the shadow of the ore bearing mountains, terraced into strange and unstable ziggurat forms during the last mineral rush on the region.

Fields of Vision

For all its risks and scant rewards, the work of mining the border and the landscape it produces are strangely beautiful. The collaborative rhythm of grinding grains with mortar and pestle has long been described as the heart of music and sociality in Africa’s rural life (e.g., Chernoff 1979). No less poetic, however, is the coordinated efforts of loading, washing and sifting sand. And it is work that perhaps better exemplifies the vicissitudes of young men’s lives in West Africa today. Timing matters. A pattern of outward expanding circles begins with the swirling of the gravel and extends to the shape of the screen, then to the motions of the miners’ hands and to the shape of the pit, replicated thousands of times as new claims spread across the forest floor. These circles mirror the social circles that sustain the diamond economy. The labor, however, is young men’s work and it is characterized by young men’s bravado. It takes courage to face the forest, let alone move it out of the way and stack it into piles. Diamond mining is largely unskilled, but some are better at it than others. It is an effort directly tied to the raw physical power of the human form, and the work shapes the body in impossibly exquisite ways—though it does so at great risk and expense.

The centrality of the body to this mode of work, and the work that mining does on the body of the worker, is what animates this project as a visual ethnography. Still photography as ethnography works by “unsettling our accounts of the world” (Poole 2005, 160). Visualizing the relationship between bodies and work can be just such an unsettling for an audience largely alienated from this form of labor. Writing about the documentary photographer Sebastião Salgado’s Workers project, Julian Stallabrass (1997) argued that in those areas of the globe that the neoliberal global economy reserves for immaterial labor, the visual image of working bodies registers as dissonance. Work of that sort today exists almost exclusively beyond the field of vision of those whom it benefits. There is, therefore, a disorienting abruptness to the image of laboring bodies. “The immediate shock,” Stallabrass (1997, 2) writes, “. . . is simply to present contemporary scenes which should long have been banished from the perfectible neoliberal state; to show in a supposedly post-industrial world, scenes of vast pre-industrial labour.”

Alluvial diamond mining in West Africa is not the productive work of postindustrial skilled tradesmen, the only form of manual labor that most residents of the global North regularly encounter. Artisanal mining is purely destructive and extractive. This is labor normally relegated to other points on the globe or conducted deep underground or it is work done by machines. For most viewers, the image of bodies worked and working in this way is startling. There is an excessiveness to the images that terms like work and labor , when rendered as text on the page, simply cannot register. The work, like the miners who do it, has a militant masculinity about it. Text can chart the larger political economy in which the mines and miners are situated (something the images alone cannot adequately do). But only the momentary alienation sparked by the visual image of this mode of work conveys the materiality of West African diamond mining as labor.

The first frame in the series, for example, positions the miner against the pit. Though he has accomplished a great deal already, he is hardly victorious. By this point he has dug his pit, but the process of unearthing gems is far from over and in fact may prove fruitless even when it is complete. He remains surrounded by vastly more forest than he can hope to exploit. But the visual evidence suggests neither resignation nor defeat. Instead the miner has achieved a kind of guarded truce. It is a surprising moment that seems to belong as much to the world of combat as it does to the world of work, with the miner positioned as a soldier surveying recently captured but tenuously held ground. His stance is echoed in the final image of a worker’s shadow cast on the muddy water of the pit. Here, however, the suggestion of both work and war is more active. In the iconic style of socialist realism, his body conflates militancy and manual labor with a simultaneity that is virtually impossible to adequately convey in written ethnography. I have argued elsewhere for understanding the labors of these young men on the battlefield and on the mines as qualitatively identical, but bound by terms like war and work, the text alone inevitably reinscribes a qualitative difference between the two. The image collapses that distinction, and allows it to register as an affront.

Deploying photography’s capacity for discordant images, its power of excessive description (Poole 2005) is not, of course, the only form that the photo essay as visual ethnography can take. W. Eugene Smith’s canonical 1948 Life magazine series “Country Doctor” remains a touchstone for the photo essay as a genre. In it the photo essay acts as a narrative, a series of microdramas with scene setting introductions, suspenseful climax, and visual dénouement. The images in the project I have assembled here are organized less cinematically and more as a collection of figure studies. This is partly because the work of mining itself has no narrative arc (it is endlessly repetitive until—perhaps—the sudden moment of rupture when a major gem is discovered). But it is primarily a function of my desire to limit the scope to the material encounter of the miner’s body with this mode of work and to explore its ready translatability into other forms of violent labor. The argument of the project is synchronic rather than diachronic, and more conductive to a collection of meditations on a theme than to a storytelling progression.

For similar reasons I chose here not to pursue another key direction for visual anthropology, what Anna Grimshaw (2005) has identified as the camera’s unique capacity to record the uncertainties and contingencies of the ethnographic encounter. The camera edits fieldwork encounters in ways that can escape the control of anyone involved in the production of the image, a fact that allows visual work to position the anthropologist more clearly in relation to the ethnographic frame than could be possible in even the most self-reflective text. Yet aesthetically the images I have assembled here owe more to the modernist documentary tradition of photographers such as Lewis Hine, Margaret Bourke-White, or Smith: photographers whose subject position in their images of the work world are hardly neutral or obscured, but photographers who do not make positionality itself the subject of the image. Elsewhere I have critiqued that mode of documentary realism (Hoffman 2007b). So have many others both inside and outside visual anthropology. But here I am less concerned with the photo essay’s capacity for reflexivity than with its capacity for disruption—a modernist impulse inherent in the medium. Many of these images are shot from behind or above. They represent a privileged gaze, to be sure, but they are not images about the gaze per se.

It is the effort to visually render strange the familiar world of work that makes these images ethnographic. Drawing inspiration from Roland Barthes’s seminal Camera Lucida , I set out to open a conversation around a specific set of images that work toward a specific purpose: overcoming the limits of text to visually explore the materiality of a border form of work. This project is not a mediation on the photo essay as such, but an effort to put the photo essay to use as a mode of ethnography. “Nothing to do with a corpus,” as Barthes (1981, 8) put it, “just some bodies.” As the Society for Cultural Anthropology expands the scope for visual ethnography with this new venture, it will be exciting to see the many other borders the photo essay allows us to cross.

Reviewer Comments

Photographic figure studies as a mode of ethnography.

by Zeynep Devrim Gürsel

Beginning is not only a kind of action; it is also a frame of mind, a kind of work, an attitude, a consciousness. —Edward Said

This photo essay marks the beginning of a new section of the Cultural Anthropology website. As Said notes elsewhere, beginnings are not just something one does but also something one thinks about. My comments below are an engagement with this inaugural photo essay by Danny Hoffman and reflections on this section and visual anthropology more broadly. Beginnings present a time to think about parameters of enterprises—in this case, the potential uses of photo essays for anthropology. What will the norms of this new section be: Will the photographs always be by anthropologists? What makes a photograph ethnographically interesting? (This might be very different than the journalistic, historic, artistic or pedagogical value of a photograph.) Will the text, images, and layout always be produced by the same person? Given the online presentation, will there be an opportunity to incorporate multimedia? In short, this particular beginning provides an opportunity to collectively think about the photo essay as a mode of ethnography and to reflect on the status of visual ethnographies within our discipline today.

Shaping a Body of Work

In his aptly titled “Corpus: Mining The Border,” Danny Hoffman has given us a rich and provocative trove of text and images that compel us to reflect not merely on the labor behind war and mining near the Sierra Leone border, but also on the photo essay as a mode of ethnography. Hoffman explores many borders here: borders between nations, between text and images, between diverse visual genres and between forms of work. Other viewers/readers will surely add to this list. I’d like to focus on what Hoffman identifies as his conceptual center. In identifying the rationale behind choosing a visual mode for this investigation, he remarks: “The centrality of the body to this mode of work, and the work that the mining does on the body of the worker, is what animates this project as a visual ethnography.” It’s precisely this issue of animation I will address.

The object of analysis in this ethnography is the material bodies of these young men and how they are shaped by their various labors of place-making, whether that place is a mine or a nation. Appropriately, then, these images of young West African male bodies laboring are deliberately not presented in one of visual anthropology’s classic tropes: the step-by-step process or mode of production genre. Hoffman is not trying to teach us the process of how diamonds are mined. His investigation concerns the making of bodies, not diamonds. I take seriously Hoffman’s statement that “this project is not a mediation on the photo essay as such, but an effort to put the photo essay to use as a mode of ethnography.” However, a photo essay is also a body of work and it is to the making of this kind of body that I want to turn briefly in order to better consider it as a mode of ethnography.

A photo essay is a purposefully arranged collection of images often with text, a narrative in which visual elements create themes and dialogues. Hoffman is serving here as photo and text editor as well as anthropologist. Therefore, in order to engage with this photo essay as a mode of ethnography , we need to think not only about the individual images but how they have been arranged. In other words, I believe what makes a photograph or particular set of photographs of interest to anthropologists is not only what is in the image(s), but also how they are put into dialogue with other images, text and/or anthropological questions. Fortunately, Hoffman’s essay contains clues as to how this body of images has been worked on by the anthropologist. By sharing his visual strategies and editorial logic, Hoffman provides the project some reflexivity, even if he claims he is less interested in the photo essay’s capacity for reflexivity.

Working against the grain of narrative expectations inherent to the genre of photo essay, Hoffman states that he does not intend for his photographs to include a narrative arc. His genre is “meditations on a theme,” rather than “storytelling.” He argues that this choice in synchronic visual genre is because “the work of mining itself has no narrative arc” and is “endlessly repetitive.” Indeed, one of the most striking layouts in the essay is the arresting triptych showing three men sifting sand and gravel in a flooded pit. Though they are a series of images, they could also be a single line of laboring bodies, the repetitive nature of their work making it impossible to know whether to read the triptych from right to left or vice versa. What Hoffman’s photography therefore manages to convey is a sheer density of repetitive manual labor: clearly the three frames must have a chronology and, strictly speaking, some form of narrative arc and diachronic structure, but the triptych layout portrays not three individual bodies sifting sand in a particular place and time but functions as a synchronous representation of a workforce.

Hoffman’s creative choice in layout allows him to represent not only laboring individuals but a workforce, a pool of available labor. The interchangeable photographs emphasize the interchangeability of laboring bodies, and visually reproduce a culture where Hoffman tells us young men cycle through the region’s mines, men who “arrive and depart as strangers.” In this triptych, as well as the two images showing bodies working side by side if not necessarily collaboratively, Hoffman is most successful at achieving “an ethnographic portrait of the shape and texture of work.”

Such a project in still photographs is a very ambitious project, indeed. For while it is possible to photograph a human laboring, it is much harder to visualize the more abstract or diffuse political economy or the social circles that sustain diamond mining. Hoffman states that while text “can chart the larger political economy in which the mines and miners are situated,” images alone are inadequate for the task. Instead he substitutes a disciplined study of the “raw physical power of human form.” The resulting images are arranged as “a collection of figure studies.” This borrowing of an artistic genre, figure study, is an opportunity to make explicit the potentially discomforting aesthetic nature of the project: here is an anthropological project asking us “as anthropologists” to look at chiseled black bodies and to take note of the preindustrial work they are doing. Hoffman, in his own words, duplicates what he takes to be the visible work of the diamond mines. It is not merely Hoffman’s professional photographs that render these bodies beautiful; rather, Hoffman informs us, “the work shapes the body in impossibly exquisite ways—though at great risk and expense.” One form of production is substituted for another: chiseled bodies for chiseled stones. Both this work of photography and that of mining aestheticize preindustrial labor. The shapely bodies are visible; the risk and expense are not.

Trained by Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins’s (1993) seminal Reading National Geographic , we need to keep asking for whom and by whom the aestheticization is being done. The absence of even bare-bones captions with information about location and dates might contribute to what Hoffman assumes is a productive “disorienting abruptness” in these images of laboring bodies. Yet the lack of captions also leaves these photographs unmoored, possibly rendering visible a moment where the “temporal displacement” is also of those photographed by the anthropologist. Hoffman’s discussion of startling preindustrial labor that he claims will be unimaginable to most viewers (despite the dense local and international networks his ethnography reveals) suggests that the critique contained in Johannes Fabian’s (1983) Time and the Other remains relevant. While Hoffman’s (2005, 2007a, 2011) other work attests to his long and complex ethnographic engagement with young men in the region, there is little in the photographs or text here that explicitly contextualizes the figures he studies. For the viewer/reader, these human forms remain anonymous human forms. Put more provocatively, how do these photographs differ from Marey or Muybridge’s late-nineteenth century studies of human locomotion? Notably, they are taken not in a studio but very much in the field with the men presumably in their everyday habits of dress (or undress). Nonetheless, the figures in the images remain equally anonymous and out of historical time.

Hoffman is not only a sophisticated and highly skilled photographer, but also a scholar aware of many different photographic traditions (see Hoffman 2007b), a position that requires us to take his editorial choices all the more seriously. He is no doubt very familiar with the oft-repeated criticism of images that render beautiful horror and hardship (such as excruciating physical labor), for he cites the single project at which such criticism has most publicly been leveled: Sebastiao Salgado’s Workers project. Hoffman seems to be grappling in earnest with how to move beyond such debates that are productive as critique, but do not generate alternate ways of imaging. Encouraging either less aesthetic images or solely images of leisure and comfort, or else abandoning visual production altogether would surely be insipid solutions. After all, the photo essay became a popular and highly influential form of visual communication in the mid-twentieth century partly because it provided aesthetic pleasure. The visual scholar Ariella Azoulay (2008) suggests doing away with the distinction between the aesthetic and the political, emphasizing that “no images can exist outside the aesthetic plane.” Freed then from the aesthetic/political binary, we should instead rigorously engage with the political stakes of the aesthetic. Hoffman’s project makes it incumbent upon us not merely to look at what is aesthetically pleasing, but to ask how what is aesthetically compelling came to be so. For whom is this beauty meaningful? For whom are these bodies “exquisite”? Where more apt for such a project than the diamond mines—that troubled site of the crossing of beauty with global politics and economics?

Figure Study as Participant-Observation

Hoffman’s idea of a photo essay as a collection of figure studies is particularly provocative for anthropology. If figure study is “a representation made for study purposes with a live model as the subject matter,” then is it not another mode of ethnography based on participant-observation? I’d like to return here to the issue of what animates a project as a visual ethnography. How is putting the photo essay to use as a mode of ethnography different than illustrating fieldwork or anthropological findings? How might anthropological knowledge animate a photographic project whether the camera is in the hands of an anthropologist or not? Most importantly for our purposes here, what kind of scholarly engagement can a photo essay animate in an audience of anthropologists?

Azoulay’s work is an extremely useful provocation for visual anthropology. 1 In her latest book, The Civil Contract of Photography (Azoulay 2008), she is calling for an anthropological engagement with photographs without naming it as such:

The photograph bears the seal of the photographic event, and reconstructing this event requires more than just identifying what is shown in the photograph. One needs to stop looking at the photograph and instead start watching it. The verb “to watch” is usually used for regarding phenomena or moving pictures. It entails dimensions of time and movement that need to be reinscribed in the interpretation of the still photographic image.

Watching photographs, for Azoulay, moves debates about photography beyond the dualistic relationship between the viewer and the photograph (as she claims is the case in the work of Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag) to a space of social relations between the photographer, the viewer and the photographed. Azoulay insists the photographed is not merely a visible presence but an active participant. The universal validity and political ramifications of this larger claim merit a longer debate, one beyond the scope of this review. However, if, as in Hoffman’s work here, we are concerned with photographs based on long-term anthropological fieldwork, taken by the anthropologist himself engaged in participant observation, Azoulay’s claim that the photographed is an active participant would seem to be a given in putting the photo essay to use as a mode of ethnography. In other words, having read Hoffman’s other work, I have no doubt that his research is based on long engagements with his informants whose lives he has charted through significant transitions. But how is this visible in the photo essay before us? Watching Hoffman’s photographs might entail what Deborah Poole (2005) calls a productive form of suspicion. For example, it might lead us to think beyond the usual critique of fixing native subjects as particular racial types instead to ask: how is it that photography simultaneously sediments and fractures the solidity of race as a visual and conceptual fact?

Of course, race is not something that Hoffman addresses explicitly, at least not in the text of this photo essay, and yet it is part of the excessive description that cannot be edited out of his images. Hoffman acknowledges that these photographs represent a privileged gaze but wants them to not be about the (or his) gaze per se. Nonetheless, I am left wondering if the photo essay as a mode of ethnography can ever escape being always also about the gaze. This is not an argument for explicitly self-reflexive work. Rather, it is a call for a reflexivity that does not revolve around a self—Hoffman’s particular encounters in the field in 2010—but instead allows for the viewer/reader to reconstruct the photographic event as a thick description, a still image with all of the social and political context which it implies. Hoffman deliberately turns his attention away from the photo essay’s capacity for reflexivity in favor of its capacity for generative disruption. I am less convinced that these two are separable.

Hoffman writes that he eschews both reflexivity and a narrative arc because of his “desire to limit the scope to the material encounter of the miner’s body with this mode of work and to explore its ready translatability into other forms of violent labor. “ Now, even if it were possible for still photographs to make visible the material encounter of the miner’s body with mining by showing the body in labor or being labored upon by the work itself, “its ready translatability into other forms of violent labor” is knowable to the viewer/reader only because of the anthropologist’s textual reporting on his encounter with the miners. How might such an exploration also have been rendered more visible to the viewer/reader? While I concur wholeheartedly with Hoffman about the potential for the photo essay to function as a mode of ethnography, in the spirit of contributing to a generative conversation about visually animated ethnography, I want to speak to a few areas in this particular photo essay where I believe the visual ethnography might have been pushed even further.

How might the chains of labor in the makeshift camps or social circles that sustain the diamond economy be visualized? Hoffman mentions these things—limiting them, that is, to text—when he might have invited them into a more complicated visual field. The triptych showing men commuting through the forest and playing soccer seems to be a beginning in this direction. What might photographs of the mentioned tents between old houses, or squatters in the ruins of the school or half-built mosque, have added to this essay? Would they detract anything?

Hoffman importantly analyzes the blurred boundaries between labor crews and militia squads and makes a striking argument that there is “a qualitative similarity for many young men between the tasks and rewards of war fighting and the tasks and rewards of mining, campaigning, or tapping rubber.” Presently the visual argument for this lies in Hoffman’s own interpretation of the first frame in the series. What we are to see here, according to Hoffman’s textual voiceover, is a collapse of the distinction between war and work on the part of the young men. Does the image in fact collapse that distinction? War is not visible in this frame but only in the author’s comment. How would we react to a photo essay composed of photographs showing young men engaged in mining, fighting, campaigning, and tapping rubber edited together? I am thinking here of Jean Rouch’s brilliant use of juxtaposition to make visual arguments such as the famous cut between a Hauka spirit possession ceremony and a colonial British military procession in Les maitres fous (1954). How might such juxtapositioning function in a still visual medium?

Alternately, to keep the focus exclusively on the miner’s body, are there bodily marks or gestures that blur boundaries between war and work? Scar stories, for example? Portraits of both war and work are differently told—though possibly not aestheticized—through the physical scars left on the workforce behind these activities. This type of photo essay would almost certainly demand either significantly more ethnographic text for each image or possibly the addition of audio interviews. In fact, Hoffman’s accompanying text begins with “the sounds on the mines” and is a paragraph-long meditation on what can and cannot be aurally registered at the Mayengema mines. Can we think of multimedia as a mode of ethnography? What might be lost or gained if this work were a multimedia piece, rather than a photo essay? Would it animate a different form of engagement?

The Status of the Photo Essay

This review of “Corpus: Mining the Border” is written for the launch of the Photo Essays section of the Cultural Anthropology website. On the one hand, I am encouraged by this initiative and honored to be a part of this inaugural conversation. As a scholar committed to the visual as a field as well as a mode of inquiry and a form of ethnographic representation, I am inspired and heartened that one of the most discipline’s most visible web platforms should feature photo essays. And yet I worry that there is a different, less serious status being granted to projects like this photo essay. What will viewers/readers make of the absence of a blind peer review or editorial process? I’m not concerned merely with academic fairness, but rather, with how the lack of such processes germane to textual publishing contribute to the perception of visual scholarship.

We need to think critically not only about photography, but about how images are brokered. Image brokers are the people who act as intermediaries for images by moving them or restricting their movement, thereby enabling or policing their availability to new audiences (Gürsel 2012). By inaugurating this photo essay form, the Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA) is serving as an image broker. What are the terms, then, of this brokering? Does this new online photo essay format promote visual ethnography or marginalize it further? For example, Cultural Anthropology published Hoffman’s excellent article “Violence, Just in Time: War and Work in Contemporary West Africa” in the journal just a few months before this online photo essay. The article contained no images. The photographs that comprise “Corpus: Mining the Border” are clearly informed by the same ethnographic research and theoretical concerns, yet they are being published separately and evidently with a different set of academic—or is it aesthetic?—expectations. I invite us all to debate the merits and costs of this separation of images in the SCA’s publishing program and believe this is a very timely discussion for the discipline at large. 2

A twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Writing Culture has recently been published with a foreword (by the former editor of Cultural Anthropology ) highlighting how it changed the face of ethnography. Interpretive anthropology was animated by a desire to “contribute to an increasing visibility of the creative (and in a broad sense poetic) processes by which ‘cultural’ objects are invented and treated as meaningful.” Perhaps we ought to treat such an anniversary as a new beginning as well, not to return to the by now tired debates in which everyone has long ago staked their position, but to seize the opportunity to rigorously interrogate modes of ethnography for a new generation. Having thoroughly debated self -reflexivity, perhaps it is time for media/modal reflexivity.

It is time to begin evaluating anthropological scholarship not only on its content but also on its chosen medium. 3 I certainly don’t mean that all anthropology articles should now have superficial visuals or multimedia attached to them. (The colonization of classroom lectures by obligatory PowerPoint is proof enough that mandatory visuals are by no means necessarily illuminating.) Rather, at a moment when many anthropologists are engaging with different forms of media, it is now feasible and meaningful to make the choice of medium one aspect of evaluating anthropological work. There has been a lot of work done to legitimate visual work in anthropology, as in the “ Guidelines for the Evaluation of Ethnographic Visual Media ” created by the Society for Visual Anthropology. But I am asking if we have come to a moment where we ask not whether a particular visual ethnography is adequate or valuable or ought to “count,” but rather begin with the question: what is the mode of this ethnographic inquiry, and how can we engage with it in an analytically rigorous way? Different modes and mediums require that makers, brokers, and the reader/viewers develop new forms of rigorous analytic engagement. What do we still need to learn as a discipline to debate costs and benefits of using different media? Will we ever ask: was text the best mode for this ethnography? I believe that articulating answers to such a question will help develop analytic rigor across media. I hope that many of you will join this conversation and contribute to a discussion not only on putting the photo essay to use as a mode of ethnography, but also on the theoretical claims and ethnographic material that Hoffman has shared.

1. Azoulay’s work is similar, in this sense, to the work of artist and critic Allan Sekula and art historian John Tagg, and indeed builds on the work of both.

2. It is true that films are corralled off at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, rather than integrated into panels. However, this is a new beginning and beginnings are a moment to reflect on forms.

3. My interest is in contributing to a debate about how visual scholarship can most effectively be part of a diverse range of anthropological conversations. I am inspired by Ethnographic Terminalia, as “a project aimed at fostering art-based practices among anthropologists and other cultural investigators or critics” that is analytically sharp and highly media-reflexive. Its website has been central to its efforts to gain greater recognition for the work of visual anthropology, serves as both a tool for promotion and an archive for legitimation. Collectively, all those involved in Ethnographic Terminalia have creatively celebrated boundaries and borders without exalting them and have launched a generative conversation about the terms of ethnography. Yet that is a conversation happening on a different website, one that might not be sought out by those not already engaged in some form of visual anthropology. The beginning, of which this review is a part, requires the thinking of the stakes and productive possibilities of having similar formal conversations on the Cultural Anthropology website.

Not Just Bodies

by Alan Klima

Danny Hoffman's broad strokes and starkly juxtaposed, figural swathes of color and shade are conscious and deliberate challenges for a conversation on possible meanings of the photo essay for anthropology today.

I quite like the aesthetic eye of the images, understand the author's attempt to situate that style for the reader, and understand the author's attempt to explain why the style is not otherwise. Although sometimes reading like a strategic fending off of template criticisms readers might have come across in the past and tucked in their back pocket should they ever have the occasion to come across an image again, the ruminations on visual anthropology do accomplish, at the very least, this highlighting of Hoffman's strong sense of aesthetic purpose, one I would further call attention to in the abstract and formalist elements of his image composition. Although still resembling the aesthetic of photojournalism, to me these photos tip quite a bit toward the abstract in their broad patches of color and large shapes, and less toward the prosaic sensationalism that photo-journalism seeks.

I don't find the photographs the least bit shocking, except in the sense of "wow, soil can look like that!" And this is so even as I am surrounded by the equally brilliant, though red-tinted, soil in Thailand. Neither did I see the content or form of what is in the photographs as “qualitatively identical” to warfare nor that the image collapses the distinction between work and war (while text can only distinguish them), as the author asserts. In fact, contrary to the author's view, I would need it to be explained, in text, exactly why they are the same as war; otherwise, I won’t see it. And still, I am not sure that I would. As image only, I have to say I find them qualitatively identical to rice farming in rural Thailand, and it would take a whole lot of words to override my eyes.

The adamant style and stance of the images, themselves, however do accomplish Hoffman’s stated goal of providing a jarring impetus for new meaning of the reproducible image mode to anthropology. How he characterizes this intervention is, by contrast, worth questioning a bit.

Hoffman’s presumption seems to rest on an idea that the photographs are communicating brutal labor, and that this would be shocking to the viewer: “For most viewers, the image of bodies worked and working in this way is startling.” Although I appreciate the photography very much and do find something jarring about it, it is not due to the seeing of the harsh work depicted in them. What I see in any given photograph—as image, quite apart from what I am told is there—is people digging with shovels, sifting about in the water, etc., something I see all the time, and I imagine this is just as familiar to most viewers. It is even more curious to be told that this is “not the productive work of postindustrial skilled tradesmen, the only form of manual labor that most residents of the global North regularly encounter.” Never mind that this is an essay on the Cultural Anthropology website, whose visitors are probably not confined to continual residence in the global North—my university home is in Northern California, where manual work in the hot sun abounds and can’t not be seen. How many other places in the global North must there be like California? I grew up the son of an academic and an artist all the way on the other coast, and had to spend long periods of my youth, like many around me, in manual labor, bending sheets of metal to the same forty-five-degree angle for hours on end, or stacking mountainous piles of lumber and damaging my body. Not that this helps me to assimilate or understand the reality of diamond mining one bit (well, a bit). It’s that, without being told the story around the acts depicted in the photos, there is little to distinguish them from all the other forms of unskilled manual labor that are very close and common in the North, if you only look around a bit, and everywhere else for that matter. Destructive or productive, there is no way to tell from the image. People stand knee-deep in water and bend down in rice farming, and have for thousands of years. Alluvial diamond mining itself may be shocking, but these are not the kind of sensation-mining photos that can deliver it one swoop. The stereotypical photojournalist's goal of bringing shocking news, or the stereotypical ethnographer's goal of bringing exotic otherness, is simply not accomplished in these simple scenes of what are, visually alone, ubiquitous acts.

I do not deny, however, Hoffman’s assertion that there is something jarring about this photography, nor does my intellect permit me to deny that there may be something here in this diamond mining that is, in truth, insanely harsher than anything I normally see among migrant workers on the hot, smoggy plains of California, or—certainly—have experienced myself. But we are supposed to understand that it is only the image that can communicate this material level of labor, a materiality that is ethnographically exotic to the North and thus defines the purpose of this photo essay: “overcoming the limits of text to visually explore the materiality of a border form of work,” where the “bodies of the miners are stripped to their essence by hard repetitive work and the hard repetitive landscape,” and therefore there is “an excessiveness to the images that terms like work and labor, when rendered as text on the page, simply cannot register.”

Yet what is jarring is not the unfamiliarity of unskilled manual labor, but the fact that it is actually not shocking at all to view these photographs, and yet somehow, it should be. This it should be is integrated into the composition and attraction of these photographs: the aesthetic shapes of the scenes, and especially that of soil and the body, strike the eye with form, and yet are not fully grasped, reckoned, realized as content, as real-life experience, at least not as image. The lack of shock, moreover, is made all the more obvious by its pairing with abstract forms of aesthetic beauty. It is the beauty of the photographs, and simultaneous richness of presence to the soil and body, creating a jarring disjuncture that calls attention simultaneously to the struggle depicted in figure and ground, between the figures and the ground, and a struggle for the viewer to reckon with what powers and forces—not only matter, but energy too—are at work here.

This leaves the question of the experience of this labor open, because, in my view, there is also present in the images a human power that is truly awesome and beautiful and unfathomable and yet somehow carried in the photography.

And, which is quite unlike the stripped bare materiality of manual labor Hoffman asserts in his textually expressed views.

True, in repetitive, manual labor there are aches. There is exhaustion, and damage to the functioning of the body, but there are also all the thoughts and reactions to those sensations in the body, which in turn interact with them, amplify and alter them, a process that if watched carefully reveals that it is impossible to tell where one starts and where the other ends. And in any case, consciousness is required for there to be any feeling whatsoever, unlike a corpse, zombie, or patient under general anesthesia, where materiality exists but pain and suffering does not.

The experience of manual labor is not a simple material fact and no worker is ever ground down to a pure material level. In fact, labor transpires in a mental medium, including all kinds of thoughts, reactions, and, indeed, stories. These miners are working within a story, even if it is not obvious. Even if there is no narrative arc to mining itself, there is for the miners.

And story, in manual labor, is perhaps the most painful aspect of it all. Whatever story is—and it is various and it can change—it sits over your shoulder, multiplying itself into more stories, into resistance to what is happening, longing for another kind of life, and all kinds of desperation. One procedure that is absolutely fundamental to performing brutal manual labor is shutting out this story (whatever it is), watching for its insistent return, and then banishing and re-banishing it, again and again. Some might be so good at it that they no longer realize what they are doing. Most people I have spoken to, however, never completely banish the stories, but they can shut them out for a time. If you can’t do that, you can’t work for long, because it will seize upon the so-called material sensations that are themselves already mixed in a soup of mental reactivities and tip the whole unbalance in a more calamitous way: more pain, probably injuries and sickness, and certainly no will to go on.

And so both the simple idea of material labor, and the idea Hoffman offers of story and narrative that are somehow not present in the arc of simple, repetitive digging in the soil (narrative as might be defined by pretending twentieth-century literature never happened) close off too neatly the idea of labor in the material world in a way that has been too common for too long. It also fits neatly into the idea that the material world is the province of the image and photography. Each to its own place.

In the essay, the proper place for text is to describe the context, set the scene, explain the political and economic setting. To me, a most unfortunate career for writing.

Then, in comes the image: to do what text cannot, and the photo essay becomes an essential antidote to the written word.

Actually, I share with Hoffman a hope for the photo essay—and any other manifestations of anthropology-through-image that may arise—but if that hope is conjured in the figure of nontext, against text, with each given its appropriate purview, then old assumptions are restrengthened, the same measures of inadequacy apportioned out, which marginalize the visual on the one hand and flatten the textual on the other. In fact, no worse outcome for the revival of visual anthropology could be possible than reinforcing the atrophied and lifeless conception of text that, if not consciously held in the ethnographic mind, is nevertheless demonstrated to be dominant in a significant portion of anthropological prose.

Photography has more intrinsic value than as antidote to the inadequacies of prose. It can make a better case for itself than that in anthropology. And, after all, most of the limits of text Hoffman speaks of are, in anthropology, actually limits either in the writers themselves or in the system by which prose is selected and published, not of text itself.

Instead, photography should rise to the occasion and assert itself, make no excuses and no apologies for its existence. And to do that it might be helpful at the same time to recognize the immense power of writing, and accomplishments of writing. In fact, it is no easy thing at all to match the power of writing in addressing the experience of brutal labor (and such labor is never simply material, not for the people who do it). For Hoffman, through his photography, to have matched writing in this task is no small accomplishment, and it was not an accomplishment that was made simply by switching media.

Hoffman’s images have risen to this occasion, and despite what he might say, open up for us our idea of labor and materiality rather than pinch them down into familiar tread.

And so, to return again to the photographs: rather than feeling shocked at the harsh labor I was visually exposed to—actually a common photojournalist’s goal, I can assure you, having asked at least a few—I found myself kicking myself to try and force myself to feel the extremities of the experience here, but the wall of Hoffman's photographs was something I could not push myself through.

Of course, I am not so naive as to throw up my hands and declare photography inadequate.

Instead, I became all the more fascinated by the photographs and appreciative of the work Hoffman has done. And this continuously escaping affect, if you will, is no fault of the photography. In fact it is precisely this tension which is so subtly involving about the photos: that every piece of information was telling me that there was something extreme, special, alter about the experience of the bodies in these pictures, and yet I am unable to pick it up and instead see form. This discomfort itself is part of what is of value in the photographs for me, because nevertheless the constant beckoning of sweat and soil is so intensely present and would not let me stop trying.

A too-neat conception of materiality considerably closes these and other disjunctures, closing off what should be an open question on the nature of labor, in a way Hoffman’s photographs themselves do not.

This particular kind of openness is not as present in the early work of the great photographer Sebastião Salgado, for instance, where narrative within the frame is thick and obvious—the gold mining scenes being the obvious comparison. How different, and how easy and comfortable in this sense, are Salgado's early and mid-career photos, where one gets an overload of meaning in a baroque sense of the fantastic and strange, even Bosch-like hell evoked at times, and magically so: surprisingly, through figures that can be only ever real, unlike Bosch who did it through imagined grotesqueries (or at least those who have not actually seen hell might believe). In Salgado, the radical alterity of brutal labor is spelled out for us, as it were, and its shocking reality is indeed conveyed through the very surreality of the compositions.

If photojournalism has a most highest and unattainable level of heaven, it is Sebastião Salgado.

Something quite different is happening in these photographs. Context and strange awesome scenes are not attended to, and something much quieter remains, held in the hand of abstract form.

And that both is—and isn’t—the materiality that Hoffman is right to say is an important evocation in the images.

Precisely: this pointing to the earth element of body and soil, the material aspect of it, and yet, with a tension—and this is what is so jarring and challenging about the photographs—because of course nothing is less suggestive of the earth element than the abstract shape and form and the aesthetic balances of light, dark, color and line of these photos. Whereas Salgado elided this tension through the immense storytelling functions of his photos, letting the baroque extravagance of his realism and the overflow of meaning almost deceptively distract from what can only be said to be an equal emphasis on figural form, Hoffman leaves us no out: either remain transfixed by abstraction, which he well knows is impossible for any caring individual to do, or jump ship, ponder the unattainable connection to the experience of this kind of work, this life situation, this labor.

As in the halting, liminal beginning and first picture of the series: not yet shocked by the wash of golden soil that is about to flail itself against the retina in the photos to come, the eye can at first pause, along with or behind a pause in the contemplative pose of the first figure, who is perhaps hesitant to begin work, who is perhaps surveying work to be done, or perhaps is marinating in that moment after hard work, a moment that lingers on longer than you intended, and it’s so difficult to start up again.

Then the second photo in this mostly warmly lit series: a distinctively cool color scheme, yet hitting off the first hint of what is really to come in the rest: broad swathes and patches of form and color in harsh juxtaposition. In this photo, one also picks up the first hint of struggle, perhaps with exhaustion or with the limits of the body, perhaps with soil. In this figure of simultaneous work and rest, and like in most conventional narrative beginnings, it looks as though the strength and power of the protagonist may be defeated.

But this is all called into question with the frantic energy of the third photo, where—in an oddly angled shot and oddly angled act of work—plants spread their knives, competing against each other to mine the sun, and the body grows fingers in a frantic race to contact, one is told, diamonds (which we never see). In this strife, the plants seek contact with a sun that gives without receiving in a project that can only ever end in their death, while the fingers that dig, sort, sift for limited, unseen objects—their project does not die. This search itself is as immortal as the desires and systems driving it are limitless, can never end, and will outlive these hands for sure.

In the fourth view, a series framed and colored in a way so reminiscent of the bathing scenes in Trinh’s Reassemblage , there is juxtaposition of time-lapsed shots reminiscent of her breakup of cinematic form, and yet in its adherence to temporal series so unlike it is as well. Here the classic ethnographic narrative of this is how it is done: A, B, C is adhered to, in thumbnail form appearing to be a strange panoramic shot but in close up actually an interested study in a complex action simply presented.

And for that, so disjunctive with the high-stakes flurry of the preceding image.

By the fifth image there can be no doubt where the essay’s aesthetic allegiances lie. Here Grecian, statuesque attraction to the male body combines with the strongest attention to large swathes of aesthetic form, in the most abstract and yet most telling photo of the series. In the midst of all these large forms, the eye is drawn soon into something, tiny, intricate, and exuding from the surface, the sweat: a cool reminder of how inscrutable—as photograph—the experience of this labor is. No heat whatsoever is communicated in the formal line and shape, and yet, there it is: dancing on the surface, the indisputable evidence, all the clearer for not having been felt in the viewer, the indisputable traces scintillating in the power of labor meeting heat, and the struggle that began in Image 2 now looks like it might be swinging the other way: a power of unknown limits is at work here, under the skin. Which is more impressive? Is it the fact that this miraculous human power exists at all, and can be unleashed at will, as seen here, or is it the fact, more known through the political and economic context, that this miracle can seem to be chained, that there is—in what is nonvisible to this particular photo essay—a power-harnessing-power, native to the social structures that render seemingly necessary this hard work in the sun, a power compacted by many confluences of fear of death with greed for shiny objects, with the numerical excitement for profit and wealth, with the ache to control land, people, other bodies. But I digress, as this photo does not call up that daunting awe. It is regnant with power, only power.

And so, in Image 6, it is no surprise that—returning to the prosaic world—even a sea of golden dirt cannot defeat these slight figures, who, in a more staid, less sensational version of photojournalism, are demonstrating the action that defines them within their life-in-this-text.

In the following view, a somewhat disjunctive series, in discontinuous semiosis:

The journey to the interior.

Then, a human will exacted upon nature, tearing like monster claws into the soil.

in the larger scale of things, and

Finally, the soaring life of—again—this power that cannot be contained within the frame of labor, not within the frame of exploitation: a power of amazing reach, unfurling itself in the failing light of day on a great peal of energy riding beyond pain, beyond all creaky calls of the body that is dying in every moment.

Dying, but it does not matter.

Not matter.

And now, in Image 8, returning again to the strange orange glow of the soil, there is something of a blow delivered here, but almost an afterthought. One foot barely hovering off the ground, still hints of soaring, but not high, not really flying at all, but propped on the weight of a force delivered into the soil, which, in this framing, no longer dwarfs and surrounds the man but appears to have already yielded to him.

Image 9: back to banality. It is work after all. Moments repeating themselves. Circles.

And finally, shadow upon swirling water, another figure of domination, posed in a mastery of the elements, and yet, as the final photo, suggesting also something of a ghost, something of the acorporeal, just form of light, just shadow: which, after all, is all there really is here anywhere in the photos. That this is photography, light and shadow, is something we are not encouraged to forget for long in this photo essay, if ever. And yet . . .

And yet still the seeping muck of water and mud, the fine as well as chunky granulations of the sun-baked soil all around, suggest so much of the elemental, the material as well, so resonant and goopy and almost palpable. Here, the soil is given power and presence, and the human: it remains a question. Power, and yet of what kind, what being?

Reader/Viewer Comments

by Eleana Kim

This inaugural photo essay and the accompanying reviews are wonderfully rich and provocative. I had a number of initial reactions to the essay that were eloquently articulated by the reviewers, particularly around the gaze, the notion of labor as startling and how to view bodies presented in ways that eschew narrative arc and foreground formal simplicity. What I'm most interested in is how the images, in an odd way, through the narrow focus on the sites of physical labor and laboring bodies, reproduces the alienated labor of capital. Perhaps this is the point, in a way, and the convergence of politics and aesthetics becomes clear through this interpretation. Yet, looking at these laboring bodies, I wondered how one could disrupt the smooth aesthetics of the images to convey a sense of the ethnographer as a laboring body (as opposed to merely an observing presence), especially through the medium of still photography (for a fascinating project on labor through a distributed video collective, see Harun Farocki’s new project: Labour in a Single Shot ) and how the (nonalienated) labor of the ethnographer/imagemaker is produced alongside the (alienated) labor of the photographic subjects. The use of photography in the production of generic bodies or anatomies has a very long history, as Zeynep Gürsel reminds us. In referring to Les Maîtres Fous , she also reminded me of the ways in which the Hauka possession ritual that is the putative subject of Rouch’s film is the unconscious subtext for the other narrative, of migrant labor. This is a form of reflexivity (however overdetermined Rouch’s resistant interpretation may seem to us now) that returns us to the political economic contexts in which these migrants labor and struggle for social power.

by Jenny Tang

Danny Hoffman’s photo essay, “Corpus: Mining the Border,” presents ten vividly colored photographs of young black male bodies juxtaposed with text describing the paradigms and structures that circumscribe their experiences living and working in border mining towns between Sierra Leone and Liberia. The contents and format of this body of work are immediately fraught with tension. On the one hand, the photographs, beautiful abstractions that, to me, recall the work of Robert Mapplethorpe much more than the modernist documentary photographers that Hoffman cites as his predecessors, represent these bodies as aesthetic entities. On the other hand, the text that accompanies these photographs recalls the mainstream photojournalism that one might find on the websites of the Times and other major newspapers.

Hoffman insists that he is “less concerned with the photo-essay’s capacity for reflexivity than with its capacity for disruption” by “unsettling an audience largely alienated from this form of labor.” While an act of disruption may unsettle and even redefine borders (and serve to render the familiar strange), it may also render visible previously unnoticed seams and lines of distinction. In doing so, does not the act of disruption itself help constitute the border that it seeks so earnestly to unmoor? Thus, what these photographs seem to disrupt is not so much the border between the privileged viewer’s life and the laborious lives of these men, but the border between word and image, between ethnographic labor and aesthetic labor. This seems to me to be the fundamental aporia that Hoffman’s photo essay struggles with, and a paradox that is made explicit on a formal level.

To begin with, Hoffman asserts that images have a power of excessive description which text cannot and does not have access to: text can chart the larger political economy in which the mines and miners are situated (something the images alone cannot adequately do). But only the momentary alienation sparked by the visual image of this mode of work conveys the materiality of Western African diamond mining as labor.

Yet Hoffman’s text does not chart the larger political economy of miners, besides giving brief descriptions of Mayengema and the fighting factions on both sides of the border. Instead, the text describes and insists on the materiality and sensuality of abstract terms like work and labor :

The sounds on the mines around Mayengema are scratchy, percussive sounds.

Work on the mines is sisyphean. Diamonds are carried across this landscape by century after century of moving water and shifting earth. One accesses them by panning creeks and river floors or by scrapping away the topsoil.

The work is always hot and always hard.

And although Hoffman self-consciously refrains from composing a photo essay cinematically, with the arc of a narrative, the text itself seems to supplement or compensate for the lack of a visual narrative with a textual one. Hoffman describes the process of mining and even narrates the possible scandal of a crew slipping away in the middle of the night because they had calculated and judged the value of the discovered stone to be greater than the risk of flight. The place of narrative is made most explicit when, in the eighth frame of his photo essay, Hoffman harks back to the first image in the series. For seven frames, we have had no explanation or analysis of this opening image, and to have one now is startling and almost confrontational. This momentary asynchrony makes apparent to the viewer/reader that, while the text and images do not form a narrative in the sense that the images do not illustrate the text, we have still been enmeshed all along in a different sort of narrative.

Like the concentric circles that Hoffman describes, in which the circles of gravel and pits “mirror the social circles that sustain the diamond economy,” we are meant to extrapolate from Hoffman’s abstractions and generalizations some sense of the specificity of these men’s lives. The mood and the tone of Hoffman’s writing seems at times to verge on magical realism, and fittingly so, for the genre of magical realism constructs a world in which the transcendental and the historical live side by side. Hoffman’s doomed American ore company, for example, echoes the doomed banana company of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude :

These towns are swollen with men. For Mano River Kongo it is not the first time. This was once a major site for the excavation of iron ore, until a mudslide in the early 1980s destroyed much of the settlement. The American ore company quickly departed, leaving what remained of Mano River Kongo to wither and die.

What this amounts to, as Zeynep Gürsel astutely notes, is that these men remain “anonymous and out of historical time.” Meanwhile, the images seem not so much to signify the excess materiality of labor that cannot be captured through words, but the aesthetic labor of Hoffman himself. His camera seems interested, not only in making sense of these bodies shaped by and exchanged in labor, but the sensuality of the bodies themselves. The erotic undertone that runs throughout these images seem part and parcel of a longstanding discourse that renders black male bodies just that: bodies, without faces and without names; bodies whose excessive energies, when harnessed, may produce, refine, and even make profit, but unhindered, threatens an excess of sexual drive. This is a particularly American discourse stemming from our history of slavery, yet it is one which Hoffman’s images cannot escape. Hoffman writes that it is the “effort to visually render strange the familiar world of work that makes these images ethnographic,” but perhaps what is rendered strange is not the world of work but our conceptions of race and blackness, displaced onto an alien context.

Ultimately, Hoffman’s photo essay makes clear that an ethnographic project is always already an aesthetic one. Perhaps this is why Hoffman feels a kinship with Lewis Hine and other modernist documentary photographers, for they were working at a time when the place of photography as aesthetic object (as embodied by the Pictorialists and Photo-Secessionists) and as social document was being debated, and these oppositional positions articulated. For Hoffman, to disrupt the border between these two is to question the stakes on which the distinctions were made in the first place.

Azoulay, Ariella. 2008. The Civil Contract of Photography . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography . Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. Originally published in 1980.

Chernoff, John. 1979. African Rhythms and African Sensibilities: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object . New York: Columbia University Press.

Grimshaw, Anna. 2005. “Eyeing the Field: New Horizons for Visual Anthropology.” In Visualizing Anthropology: Experimenting with Image-Based Ethnography , edited by Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz, 17–30. Portland, Ore.: Intellect.

Gürsel, Zeynep Devrim. 2012. “ The Politics of Wire Service Photography: Infrastructures of Representations in a Digital Newsroom .” American Ethnologist 39, no. 1: 71–89.

Hoffman, Danny. 2005. “ The Brookfields Hotel (Freetown, Sierra Leone) .” Public Culture 17, no. 1: 55–74.

_____. 2007a. “ The City as Barracks: Freetown, Monrovia, and the Organization of Violence in Postcolonial African Cities .” Cultural Anthropology 22, no. 3: 400–428.

_____. 2007b. “ The Disappeared: Images of the Environment at Freetown’s Urban Margins .” Visual Studies 22, no. 2: 104–119.

_____. 2011a. “ Violence, Just in Time: War and Work in West Africa .” Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 1: 34–57.

_____. 2011b. The War Machines: Young Men and Violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia . Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Lutz, Catherine A., and Jane L. Collins. 1993. Reading National Geographic . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Poole, Deborah. 2005. “ An Excess of Description: Ethnography, Race, and Visual Technologies .” Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 159–79.

Stallabrass, Julian. 1997. “ Sebastião Salgado and Fine Art Photojournalism .” New Left Review , no. 223.

Begin typing to search.

Showing results mentioning: “ ”, sca website.

These results are drawn from our Fieldsights content, as well as announcements and information pages.

Our Journal

These results are drawn from articles published in Cultural Anthropology since 2014.

The New York Times

Magazine | edward burtynsky’s mesmerizing images of copper mines.

Advertisement

Magazine | Photo Essay

Edward burtynsky’s mesmerizing images of copper mines.

Photographs by EDWARD BURTYNSKY and TEXT BY JON MOOALLEM OCT. 22, 2015

Trying to comprehend the scale of open-pit extraction with aerial photographs. Related Article

T he scale of an open-pit copper mine feels impossible; it is a Bible-grade phenomenon made by machines. Vehicles called bucket-wheel excavators, nearly five times the size of the largest dinosaurs, rip up the surface and gradually descend, piling 200,000 cubic meters or more of rock behind them every day. Once the copper is extracted, waste products and unrecoverable metals stream out as tailings, snaking tributaries that turn psychedelic-looking as they oxidize in open air for the first time in millions of years. Each excavator, meanwhile, turns the land it is standing on into a ledge and leaves a succession of these steps, or ‘‘benches,’’ behind it as it goes. The Chino Mine, for example, in Grant County, N.M., has been excavated persistently for more than a century and now stretches almost two miles across and 1,350 feet down. It’s a chasm, a void, a deep and disordered amphitheater built around an abyss. It gets four out of five stars on TripAdvisor.

‘‘Wow is that place HUGE If you get time go visit this mine it is just huge,’’ writes one reviewer who visited the overlook point on the side of Highway 152. ‘‘What a huge pit,’’ says another. Another : ‘‘Wow!’’ Another: ‘‘What a hole in the ground’’ And : ‘‘Dange [sic] it’s deep. What a hole!@!!!! Huge hole in the ground.’’

Stupefied giddiness, disbelief: these seem to be universal responses to open-pit mines. When the photographer Edward Burtynsky started taking pictures of mining complexes in 1981, it was, in part, out of this same simple wonderment. ‘‘I look for the biggest mines in the world,’’ Burtynsky says, and these photographs, shot in Arizona and New Mexico in 2012 and published here for the first time, include both the Chino and the continent’s largest copper mine, the Morenci Mine, which is projected to produce 900 million pounds of copper every year for the next five years.

Burtynsky’s other work includes photographs of oil-drilling and tar-sands infrastructure, quarries, dams, geological features blasted open for railways and the sweeping spectacles of Chinese manufacturing towns: engineered landscapes that demonstrate, in visceral ways, our species’s awesome capacity for problem-solving and how far we’ve come. Once, early humans hid in underground caves to avoid being eaten by giant cats; now, we tear holes in the ground and turn the copper recovered there into electrical wiring for products like the Cat Mate C3000 Automatic Dry Food Pet Feeder. We’ve learned to reshape the earth to get what we want and need, sometimes indifferent to the radically altered condition in which we leave it. ‘‘I have a fondness for when the landscape becomes surreal,’’ Burtynsky says. And here, he shows it to us: histrionically multicolored, carved up and confused.

Open-pit mines are wounds we’ve inflicted, and the wonderment they excite easily becomes tinged with pangs of remorse or dread. Burtynsky calls that storm of feeling ‘‘a reversal of the sublime. In the beginning, ‘the sublime’ meant us in fear of nature,’’ he explains. We would look up at a thundercloud or mountain, or across a heavy sea, and be ‘‘awe-struck or powerless. But fast forward to the Industrial Revolution, and 150 years after that, and now we are the awesome and fearsome force that’s reshaping the planet.’’

And that power can’t be disowned. ‘‘We work in a world of atoms and molecules,’’ Burtynsky told me. ‘‘I’m talking to you on a phone. There’s copper in this phone.’’ It’s in our appliances and cars, inside the walls of our homes. ‘‘If you feel revulsion to this landscape,’’ he said, ‘‘you should have a revulsion to your whole life.’’

That tension is irreconcilable, maybe inevitable. Humans have always ripped materials out of nature, but the pace and scale of that extraction has accelerated so quickly that it challenges, or even outpaces, the individual human imagination’s ability to make sense of the consequences. It’s a strange predicament: to feel dwarfed by the momentum of your own species; to feel yourself being threatened, even swallowed up, by problems and to recognize that you’re also complicit in them. Think of how the person operating the excavator must feel, disappearing down the mine.

Burtynsky’s photographs are opportunities to stare that dilemma in its abysmal eye and let that tension in; to look down — way down in these mines — and allow yourself to feel unsettled, to lose your balance a little.

‘‘Huge hole in the ground,’’ one of the more pensive TripAdvisor reviewers wrote . ‘‘I just imagine falling into that hole.’’ Exactly. There may be no getting to the bottom of any of this.

The Voyages Issue: Six Photographers on Their Dream Journeys

Watching the Planet Burn

Scenes From a Human Flood

Desperate Crossing

Photo-essay on gold mining in Nicaragua

Howto mine gold in nicaragua.

“A photo-essay by James Rodriguez documenting the history and consequences of mining activities, both artisanal and industrial, in the so-called mining triangle in northeastern Nicaragua. ” Rodriguez is an independent documentary photographer based in Guatemala. His intimate images from the Mining Triangle in Nicaragua’s deepest mountain interior are fascinating to me, as this is one region of the country I still have not visited.

The World Roof Hotel

You may also like, hot off the presses: moon living abroad in nicaragua, living abroad in nicaragua wins book of the year, belize with a baby: shanti heads south, more stories, photo gallery: road trip to the stanley hotel with the google pixel camera.

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

Gold Mining and Unequal Exchange in Western Amazonia: A Theoretical Photo Essay

I combine fieldwork photography and ethnographic documentation of gold mining in Madre de Dios, Peru, to examine the localized material, social, environmental, and health outcomes of the global gold boom. This 'theoretical photo essay’ examines how local and global forces coalesce around gold mining and influence peoples and environments in Western Amazonia. I use embodiment theory in anthropology, ecological economics, and theories of underdevelopment to understand local consequences of the global gold trade and to elucidate how opulence and the machinations of capital accumulation in economic centers of the world occur at the expense of human lives and environments in the hinterlands. Building on this analysis, I draw upon the Marxian concepts of mystification and fetishization to show how the rationale and language invoked in discourses about the gold boom in Madre de Dios work to obscure interconnections between the devastating local consequences of the global gold trade and the unequal economic global system of exchange that unevenly distributes profits and risks.

Related Papers

Gerardo Damonte

DAMONTE, Gerardo; BUENO DE MESQUITA, Mourik; PACHAS, Victor Hugo; CHÁVEZ, Mary; FLORES, Adhemir y de ECHAVE, José (2013). “Small-scale gold mining and social and environmental conflict in the Peruvian Amazon". En CREMERS, L., KOLEN, J. & THEIJE, M. de (eds.). Small-scale gold mining in the Amazon. Amsterdam: CEDLA. Cuadernos del CEDLA, 26.

Indigenous Life Projects and Extractivism

Amy Penfield

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

Mareike Winchell

Recent scholarship in anthropology offers critical attention to inequality as a constitutive feature of social life to which specific legal, cultural, and religious traditions supply diverging answers. Drawing upon these debates, this article explores the ways that Quechua- and Spanish-speaking subjects in the Bolivian province of Ayopaya imagine, inhabit, and strive to address inequalities stemming from the region’s history of labor violence. While Ayopaya’s history of hacienda servitude lives on in contemporary structures of racialized disparity, I argue that it also conditions particular traditions of exchange that rural groups draw from in order to contest a new gold mining economy. Against more pessimistic accounts of late capitalism as a moment of inexorable abandonment, particularly for indigenous groups, I query the tenacity of obligation and probe its political possibilities as a practice of claim making (and a scholarly heuristic) by which to expose the ethical refusals on which “free” exchange relies. Keywords: inequality, labor, indigeneity, ethics, extractivism, value, circulation

Marjo de Theije

Bartholomew Dean

Maria Laura Spanedda

The Owners of the Land is a documentary about mining speculation in the Peruvian Andes. The work is the outcome of a collaboration between the Peruvian anthropologist Juan Javier Rivera Andía and the English filmmaker Peter Snowdon: together they crafted a film from a section of the installation with the same name, on display for the first time in October 2013 at the Het Mijndepot in Waterschei, Belgium. Starting from the history of a mine, the authors illuminate a traditional fringe context and its hard permanence in a contemporary era, where communities have to put them into conflict for affirming an identity out of the juncture between ethnicization and marginalization.

Wendy Lynne Lee

Originally published as a review in the journal Environmental Ethics, 2012: Review: Nicholas A. Robins. Mercury, Mining, and Empire: The Human and Ecological Cost of Colonial Silver in the Andes. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011. 320 pages. ISBN 978-0-253-35651-2 (cloth). US$45.00. It is an easy thing to say that Nicholas A. Robin’s Mercury, Mining, and Empire is a good book—a very good book—but it is, I think, a more significant thing to spell out why it is more than just good, but truly important; it is the “must read” recommended by David Cahill of the University of New South Wales. First, the premise: Robins offers a detailed, vivid, comprehensive history of silver mining and mercury amalgamation in the Andes—at Potosi and Huancavelica—during the sixteenth and into the seventeenth centuries: “[b]etween 1550 and 1800 at least 136,000 metric tons of silver were produced in Latin America accounting for 80 percent of global production during that period” (4). He argues that the discovery not only of silver deposits, but of improvements in the amalgamation and volatilizing process through which high-grade silver is produced, “would not only help Spain consolidate its position as a global power but would also play a key role in the emergence of the industrial revolution and ultimately modern global capitalism” (4). This is a big claim, but one that becomes irresistible as Robins develops this compelling and tragic tale. Silver mining at Potosi and Huancavelica is a metaphor for the egregious human labor and environmental abuses that characterize global capitalism and its penchant for what I have called genocidal profiteering.

Geographical Journal

Jeffrey Bury

Salvatore Straface

Artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) and large-scale mining in the Ecuadorian Amazon region is potentially harmful to nature, and its impacts are associated with environmental degradation and deterioration of people’s health. So far, limited efforts have been directed at exploring the current situation and challenges facing the implementation of environmental policies in the country. The objective of this study focused on analyzing the historical and current situation and challenges of ASGM in the Amazon region of Ecuador in relation to a political perspective (laws), socioeconomic impacts (population displacement, loss of livelihoods, migration of people, cost of living, water scarcity, and health impacts), and environmental impacts (biotic and abiotic). The methodology used was based on a literature review and interviews, and information that was discussed through an expert judgment allowed for establishing challenges to improve ASGM management. The main results indicate t...

Bulletin of Latin American Research

Miranda Sheild Johansson

This article discusses the rumour of gold in an indigenous, Andean community. As the rumour circulated, it triggered speculation regarding potential claims to the gold, as well as concerns about how extraction should be managed in order to maintain a good relationship with the animate landscape. Specifically, the rumour tested the previous flexibility of community rules concerning land access, as well as assigning more responsibility to the rotated local leadership position. Rumours offer insights into the social and emotional contexts within which resource extraction takes place, while at the same time playing an important part in shaping these very same contexts.

RELATED PAPERS

Ticiano Costa Jordão

Revista Endoscopia

Fernanda Torres Ruiz

Rainbow Chen

Ludmila Torlakova

MEDICINA (Buenos …

Raul Lisanti

Dyes and Pigments

Alexander Chizhov

Direito Unifacs Debate Virtual

Marcos Lourenço

Fisioterapia e Pesquisa

Renato Moraes

Cancer research

marcello riggi

Revista Ceres

Leandro Rodrigues da Silva

School Psychology Quarterly

James Appleton

Vietnam Journal of Science and Technology

Nguyen Thi Van Anh K17

Luigi LACCHE'

Josephine Etowa

Pulmonary Circulation

Megha Talati

Korean Journal of Chemical Engineering

Seung-hyeon Moon

Liina Talgre

The Indian Journal of Agricultural Sciences

Qiang-Sheng Wu

Dragan Milasinovic

Journal of Biological Chemistry

Kimm Hamann

Van Medical Journal

Abdullah Gul

Journal of Evolution of Medical and Dental Sciences

Vojnotehnicki glasnik

Zvonko Radosavljevic

RELATED TOPICS

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

• Packing List

An Outback Mining Town – A Photo Essay

Ever wondered what it looks like out here in an outback mining town? It’s not all tumbleweeds and rail tracks, or is it….?

Do you have any interesting photos from these quirky small towns scattered all over Australia? If so share them in the comments section below!

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

RESEARCH THEMES

• Data Analytics, Informatics & Visualisation
• Governing the GCR
• Histories & Futures
• Inclusive Economies
• Poverty, Inequality and Social Mobility
• Social Change
• Spatial Transformation
• Sustainability and Just Transitions
• Understanding Quality of Life
• Government Support

RECENT SEARCHES

• Strategy for developmental green economy for Gauteng
• Workshop on violent community protests and xenophobic violence
• Colloquium on the global meltdown in partnership with GEDA
• Green Strategic Programme for Gauteng
• GIS data acquisition and GIS data projects
• State of the Gauteng City-Region Review
• Public information on the GCR
• GCRO 2013/2014 Annual Report
• Annual Financial Statements 2012/2013

Potsiso Phasha

Photo essay: Scavenger economies of the mine dumps

• Date of publication: 1 May 2014

“I work here and whatever I make is for my house back home. I will never stay here – I am here for work alone. Life is hard. But you must never suffer as long as you still have your hands; that’s what my father taught me. He taught me you must work hard to have your own things” – Tofara*, a Zimbabwean national who works on the mine dumps.

In 1886, a prospector digging in the ground in an area just west of what is now Johannesburg discovered gold. His discovery led to the establishment of the world’s greatest goldfield, the Witwatersrand, a reef stretching some 55km in an east-west direction (Harrison and Zack, 2012; Mphephu, 2003). Over the last hundred years, this reef has produced nearly 50 000 tons of gold (Mphephu, 2003). The discovery of gold in this region of South Africa laid the basis for what is today a giant region of inter-connected towns and cities, housing almost 13 million people and contributing over a third of national economic output. It also contributed immensely to the development of the country as a whole.

As more and more mining activity took place on the Witwatersrand, its physical landscape began to change. A number of mine tailings began to define the landscape – a result of mining operations where large volumes of ore were mined and brought to the surface where it was crushed and gold extracted (Mphephu, 2003). The pale mine tailings have since become ‘permanent’ features of our landscape. According to Mphephu (2003) there are over 250 mine tailings covering an area of 44 000 hectares. At the time of their establishment, mine tailings – commonly referred to as ‘the mine dumps’ – contained fine traces of gold which could not be extracted. With advances in mining technologies and increasing gold prices the tailings have, over the last two decades, been reprocessed to recover the gold still in them.

Today the region’s physical landscape is once again in a state of transition due to this reprocessing. The reworking, in which mining machinery reshuffles the mine dumps, has resulted in an unusual scavenger sub-economy. Every day from dawn to very late in the evening, groups consisting only of men intensively and illicitly work the polluted soil of these pale landscapes in search of scrap metals – leftover fragments of old mine operations that are either surfaced through the mechanical reshuffling or manually dug up. This is best seen on the mine dumps in the eastern edge of Johannesburg along Heidelberg and Rosettenville Roads, the focus of this photo essay. As the scrap metals surfacing in one site get depleted, the men move on to other areas, often resorting to manual excavation in order to maintain their livelihoods.

The intensity of this scavenger sub-economy is intriguing. On the one hand it is very different from what is conventionally understood and valued as an ‘urban economy’ by city-planners. On the other hand it is worth asking whether this economy, although largely invisible, is any different from the early prospecting activities – where opportunity-seekers dug in the ground for scraps of gold a century ago, in the same area – that were the very foundations of the city-region we have today.

This photo essay follows a group of men in the Rosettenville and Booysens areas of Johannesburg, who make a living through ‘scavenging’ for scraps of metal on old mine dumps. It places them in the context of the strange and distorted mining landscapes they inhabit, and reveals some of the key dynamics of their activities, from the moment of unearthing of leftover metal shards to when these are sold to scrapyards in the nearby Johannesburg central business district. Ultimately, the essay portrays the workings of an invisible but vibrant economy on the region’s mine dumps – seemingly dead spaces typically overlooked as mere waste ground.

The mine dump off Rosettenville Road south-east of the Johannesburg central business district is interesting because of its ‘dual’ nature. It is formed from mining waste dug up from underground, as well as construction rubble that has been dumped there. Both layers contain traces of metals. Its dual nature is reflected in the fact that both a mining company currently re-mining it for gold, and a group of men searching it for metal waste, are now reshaping the landscape.

Working in these landscapes has dangers, the biggest being the fact that the ground gets more destabilized the more excavating the men do. With no proper mining tools, their work creates cliffs which regularly collapse. This particular area in the photograph has a large concentration of steel but the cliff now has a crack, and rock chips off a number of times a day. Most of the men now fear digging here. The instability of this landscape is further aggravated by rain. “Water is dangerous because it goes between the crack and makes the ground loose”, says Ronny, one of the men who works on the mine dump every day.

Most of the men dig very close to the edge of the hill. Although dangerous, digging here has some advantages. The biggest one is that boulders and undesired rubble can be thrown off the dump with ease and so do not need to be carried away. This facilitates faster digging, implying more money can be made in a day. Working further from the edge means the process of digging is hampered by all the rubble that gets unearthed and is left lying around covering other potential areas for digging. Working on the edge is also advantageous because when it is time to leave at the end of the day, the metals are easily thrown off the cliff to the bottom where they can be collected again and carried away. This way the men can climb down the hill without an excess load.

The mine dump undergoes physical change every day. With various metals ranging from steel (heavy, light, stainless); aluminum; copper; brass and lead being extracted, a series of ‘caves’ remain, indicating to the other men where it has been dug before. The steep gradient of the landscape prevents them from digging too deep as more and more cliffs and caves are created, in turn increasing the danger of working these spaces. Hence the men constantly move around to dig in new spots.

Ronny walks back from fetching water and buying cigarettes from an informal trader not far from the mine dump. Whenever one of the men leaves the dump to go buy something, the other men give him their money to buy for them as well. Sometimes they go all the way into the Johannesburg CBD to buy bread to eat over lunch. This interaction demonstrates a mutual relationship between two different informal economies – street trading and “illegal” mining, but also the ability of these economies to bleed into the formal economy.

Most of the men on the mine dumps are Zimbabweans. Ronny talks about how working on the mine dumps is a real job for him, the same way people go to work in offices every day. As such, he has developed a strong sense of work ethic and discipline. “South Africans do not like these kinds of jobs because they are laborious. You have to work very hard. They prefer better jobs, white collar jobs at the office. Because they have an ID they can access more things like applying for loans”, says Ronny. “I have to save and take everything back to Zimbabwe. Every time I go home, I take everything I own. When I come back I start from scratch”.

“I have been working on this mine dump for eight years. I started on the other side. I am married to these mine dumps” – Victor.

Victor, along with the other men, speaks of another gang of men that operates on the mine dumps. Their mission is to acquire as much of the steel getting unearthed by the mining machinery as possible, with as little work as possible. They follow the machinery as it moves around reshuffling the mine dump, assuming ‘ownership’ of that part of the dump, and everything that the mining machinery brings to the surface. The gang comprises about 20 men, who are feared for not hesitating to deploy violence to secure the any of the metals the machines unearth. They are not interested in doing any manual work and as such ‘appropriate’ the big mining machines to work for them. In instances where very little steel is brought to the surface, the gang is also known to rob the other men of the scrap metals they have found, claiming that it was dug from an area that ‘belonged’ to them. This reveals a criminal economy living off an “illegal” economy that also feeds an informal trader economy. While some of the interactions in the space where these different kinds of economies exist are defined by mutual gain, others are driven by individual benefit. The result in the latter case often has life threatening consequences for those actors with lesser power.

Digging on the mine dump is a gamble. There are no guarantees that metals will be found on any given day. On this day, after many hours of digging, brothers Tofara and Ronny had only recovered a few strands of steel. Late in the afternoon they moved to another spot to start digging. As it was already late and they were frustrated, they decided to spend the night on the mine dump digging. “If I had a lot of money I wouldn’t be here. If you were to give me money today, I’d go straight to Zimbabwe. I was last there two months ago. I love Zimbabwe. I have my own land there. It is huge. I have cattle on it and my younger brothers and cousins take care of them. I also love our president. Not ‘like’; I love him! He gives his people land. Which other president will do that?” says Ronny.

After the metals are thrown down the mine dump, they are gathered into a bag and prepared to be sold on the same day. The heavy load is carried for a few meters to the road where a small truck comes to pick the men up. The men have a good relationship with a scrap dealer in the CBD and he offers them transport from the mine dump at no charge.

Although the men are here for the same thing, with no guarantees of success, there is no form of competition between them. They work together, eat together and share their tools. They also respect each other’s workspace. In instances where one is not done digging in a particular spot, he is allowed a chance to continue in the same spot the following day. “Mdala”, in the picture, spent yesterday relaxing in the city’s parks in the CBD, and today continues where he left off. He says he came back to dig as he had run out of money.

Ronny digs in his pocket to see how much copper he has accumulated. Of all the metals, copper is the most precious due to its high retail price. When recovered, it is immediately put away, normally in the pocket, to ensure that it is not forgotten on the mine dump at the end of the day.

The scrap dealers to whom the men sell complain when copper is still covered with a plastic casing, and often reject it on this basis. So the process of trading the scrap metal involves a phase where it is cleaned on site to ensure that dealers do not reject it or offer a lower rate. The men burn the copper wires so that the casing melts off and the copper wires inside are exposed.

Each metal has its own retail price. Copper, in the picture, has the highest value sold at a rate between R48 and R50 per kilogram; brass is R25/kg; stainless steel R8/kg; lead R7/kg; heavy steel, which is the most prominent of all the excavations, is sold at R2,50/kg while light steel trades at R1,60. The men are very aware of what is valuable and what is not – and how to treat the most valuable. Copper is the ultimate prize.

At the end of the day, the men make a quick cell phone call to their scrap yard owner and within 10 minutes his truck stops beside the mine dump. The metals are weighed and the men paid immediately. Immediate access to cash means they are able to attend to daily bills such as food. Tofara talks about how, as a Zimbabwean, the cash payment arrangement is perfect for him as it requires no paperwork. Transactions are started and concluded within minutes. Being able to sell the metals on the same day saves the men money because they do no have any storage costs to pay for. All their scrap metal is now in somebody else’s hands to store at their cost.

The Booysens mine dump, a few kilometers west of the Rosettenville Road dump, is relatively flat with a lot of vegetation. After some digging the landscape begins to take on a different form. As it was shortly after gold was discovered in Johannesburg, heaps of underground soil define the terrain, marking the depths of the digging. The mounds of unearthed material reveal a series of past movements over the landscapes and the traces of decisions made on it, and speak to the men of where and how deep to dig before moving on. The pursuit of opportunity is made visible through the day to day changes in the landscape. In the distance, the tall buildings of the Johannesburg CBD, a city built from these same kind of excavations a century ago, can just be seen.

In the same way as copper goes through fire to get cleaned before it is sold, steel needs to be cleaned by knocking off the hardened bits of soil covering it. The pieces have been underground for a long time and are in a process of decomposition. Tlou, pictured here, talks about how when these metals were disposed of by the mines they were coated with chemicals that increased their rate of decomposition. The bucket on the right in the picture contains heavy steel that now looks like a rock. Once it is crushed, the rust falls off and the steel inside is recovered.

“I don’t want to do this anymore, man. I want to do other things, I just need money to start. R2000 would be okay to start. I want to buy things and sell to people. It is almost Christmas time now, people are going back home (to Zimbabwe) and they will be looking to buy clothes and toys and stuff. I must make money, my man”, says Ronny. He says the pipe he is cutting in the picture will be his meal for tonight and for lunch tomorrow, while he and Ike (in the background) pursue a much bigger pipe.

Ike and Ronny discovered this long pipe together one day while walking from the Booysens mine dump. From the road they saw a brown pipe jutting out from the earth, and when they got to it discovered it was much longer. They do not know exactly how long it is but judging by its thickness and diameter, at the current length of the furrow, it is estimated to weigh around two tons. Two tons of heavy steel would be worth around R5000.

The Booysens mine dump is bordered by a municipal waste dump. This dump has another group of men who also scavenge for recyclables such as plastic and glass. Like the gangs on the Rosettenville Road mine dump they are known to be a violent group that views the municipal waste dump as a space for them alone. They are strongly territorial and anybody who goes up the waste dump risks their life as the group understands strangers to be there to take their ‘money’, referring to the actual waste. While some informal economies gel with ease, others within the same informal economic space are strongly repellent to each other due to the struggle to maximize waste, or money, at the end of the day.

To some of the men, the mine dump has become more than a place of extraction. It is their home. They pay no rent, and they can work for much longer hours. This tunnel is on the Booysens mine dump. It links the municipal waste dump and the mine dump, and some of the men use it for shelter. “One guy discovered it. It was a small hole and he started to dig that hole more to see what was inside it. He found there was drums, steel drums, about maybe 80 of them. He did not tell anyone. Every day he would come here, take a few drums and go sell them at the scrap yard. He didn’t have to dig anymore. The other guys started to wonder what was happening and where this guy was getting the drums, because he would take like 3 each day, and in 30 minutes he was gone, gone home. So they followed him and found the drums. From then everyone began to take them and sell as well. And now it’s a place where people sleep”, explains Ronny. “It’s not too old. It was found last year towards the end of the year, like around this time”. About 8 people sleep in here every night.

It is much easier to dig during the rainy season. Some advantages of digging in the rainy season include the fact that the ground is softer and there is no dust. However there are also disadvantages. The soil is much heavier to lift with a shovel, and rain is also a disruption to the workflow and productivity. If it rains for a day or two in a row there will be no food to eat. The mine dump is empty and no one is working because all the holes that have been dug are filled with water, making it risky to walk around as it isn’t clear which is a puddle and which goes deeper. The rainy season does however present an opportunity to store some metals if they are in small quantity. Small but heavy pieces of steel are wrapped in plastic and placed at the bottom of the water filled holes, making them easier to access the following day when the water level had subsided.

The mine dumps are liminal environments. The popular perception that they are dead spaces makes them attractive to criminal elements. Copper wires, often stolen, are sometimes stripped and prepared for sale here. Not many people interact with these places, making them a safe haven for activities people would not do openly in other more accessible parts of the city.

While the process of unearthing scrap metal from the dump is itself laborious, the logistics of how these metals reach the market is equally so. On the Rosettenville Road dump, the scrap yard owner comes to collect the men and their metals. In Booysens, however, they have to transport the metals themselves, over a distance of close to three kilometers. While it is good to make the largest discoveries on the mine dumps, this comes at a cost. When the men have a fortunate day on the dump, unearthing a lot of metals, they may make more than one trip to the scrap yard to ensure that the finds do not over-accumulate, making it harder to transport them at the end of the day. The costs of transporting the metals come in various forms ranging from physical and mental exhaustion to possible physical injury if a large piece of metal falls on a leg, for example, or someone accidentally rolls down the mine dump – as Tofara has in the past. In some instances the discovery is a single, heavy piece of steel. Such finds immediately escalate the costs.

Large finds not only require more manpower to lift and move; they call for moving equipment – often makeshift trolleys. These have to be sound as well, and in this precarious economy this is seldom the case due to financial constraints. The trolleys are always shared, making them more vulnerable to damage. They also have a plastic base which bends under heavy load, immediately reducing their mobility and requiring more force to push and pull. This is a great challenge especially on the gravel road from the mine dump. The moment it reaches the street less manpower is required, although it still rolls with the base touching the ground. Ultimately, all costs end up being financial. The strength required could result in physical injury; the digging itself could lead to health problems as it has with Paul, who now has pneumonia; and the trolley needs maintenance as well.

One of the men who used to work the mine dumps has been given a job as a scrap yard assistant. As soon as scrap metals arrive he cuts up all ties and weighs them and pays out. He is the ‘face’ of the shop. The owner only appears in cases of large sales that require large amounts of cash. On this particular day for example, a group of men came in with over R4000 worth of copper. In these instances, the shop assistant calls the owner to bring more cash to complete the transaction. The owner must always have cash to pay for incoming scrap. When scrap fills up at his shop he quickly arranges transport to take it to a smelter in town, in order to always have adequate liquid cash.

In order to remain competitive and to secure clients, the scrap yard owner says he sometimes organises braais for the men, and every day he arranges soap and water for them to wash their hands. He needs to show a sign of appreciation to the men because there are many other scrap yards around and he could easily lose them as clients. This is particularly so due to the fact that the trading process is not always a smooth one. Some tensions often emerge between the buyer and seller as both parties are aware that the other will try to maximise gains. The seller sometimes has not cleaned the steel properly and it is still covered with other solids, or the copper wires are still covered with plastic. The buyer could easily offer a lower price, or claim that some steel is actually hardened solid and reject it. Both sides play this game of weight: the seller may try to allow additional weight to his metals by not cleaning them properly; while the scrap dealer might offer a much lower rate claiming he is also offered a lower price when he sells poorly cleaned material for smelting.

At the end, an agreement is reached and final payouts calculated. The calculator is a powerful symbol because it brings formal order into this scavenger economy. From sunrise to sunset there are no formal rules – although there are many hidden social codes and boundaries – that govern the way scrap metals are extracted from the earth. The calculator stands as a tool of governance, an important link between the formal and informal economies. It subjects the men to another world of rules and logic, a numerical system that makes the thrown-away metal fragments that they collect on the dead spaces of the mine dumps materially significant. This desk in the scrap shop also suggests a sense of authority – a station where matters are resolved and important things documented. With the calculator it establishes the domain of order. From this point on, the metals make their way into the formal economy.

*Names have been changed to protect the identity of each individual

_____________________

Harrison, P. and Zack, T. (2012) The power of mining: the fall of gold and rise of Johannesburg, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, Vol. 30(4), 551-570.

Mphephu, N.F (2003) Rehabilitation of Tailings Dams on the Central Rand; Johannesburg, available online: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/20289183/Rehabilitatio... (accessed 06 November 2013).

The GCRO sends out regular news to update subscribers on our research and events.

• Investigations
• On the ground
• Photo Essays
• Inside The Narwhal

Trending Topics

• Climate Change
• Corporate Influence
• Environmental Law
• Indigenous Protected Areas
• Indigenous Rights
• Offshore Drilling
• Ontario’s Greenbelt
• Renewable Energy

In Photos: The Canadian Mining Boom You’ve Never Seen Before

“If you’re in Vancouver this is way out in the middle of nowhere, but way out in the middle of nowhere is our backyard.”

Those are the words of Frederick Otilius Olsen Jr., the tribal president of a traditional Haida village on Prince of Wales Island, Alaska.

When I met him, he had travelled to Ketchikan, Alaska, to meet with officials about the risk posed by the mining boom across the border in British Columbia.

He stood on the boardwalk overlooking Ketchikan’s fishing fleet and waved his hands animatedly while he told me about how his culture — and southern Alaska’s economy — depends on salmon.

The week before, I’d spent several hours flying in a small fixed-wing plane over B.C.’s mining boom to capture never before seen images of the province’s largest and most remote mines.

Door removed, I captured hundreds of frames as we passed over the Red Chris copper and gold mine, which began operation in late 2014. Its tailings pond and dam rises impossible and angular out of a soft, sloping valley.

Set within the vast and largely intact headwaters of northwestern B.C.’s greatest wild salmon rivers, the Red Chris mine is just one of 10 mines either in operation, in development or in advanced exploration stages in this region.

It is owned and operated by Imperial Metals, the company responsible for the Mount Polley mine disaster in central B.C. If the name seems familiar, it’s because in 2014, a tailings dam at Mount Polley collapsed, resulting in one of the worst environmental disasters in Canadian history. All told, 24 million cubic metres of contaminated mining waste flooded into a lake —  a source of drinking water and salmon-spawning ground that feeds the Fraser River.

A new study from the United Nations Environment Programme notes Canada has had seven known mine tailings spills in the last decade, only one less than China, which tops the list.

“ The increasing number and size of tailings dams around the globe magnifies the potential environmental, social and economic cost of catastrophic failure impact and the risks and costs of perpetual management,” says the report.

A view from the sky gives perspective on both the enormity of the mines but also their proximity to Alaskans who, living downstream, fear they may unfairly suffer the consequences of another Mount Polley style accident.

“This is our Amazon right here and they’re not making any more of it,” Olsen Jr. said.

The following photo essay was made possible by 103 readers, who donated more than $10,000 to bring this unprecedented assignment to life.

B.C. and Alaska share some of the world’s most productive salmon rivers. However, the region is also home to some of the largest untapped gold and copper reserves in the world. Gold is mined primarily for use in jewelry, while copper conducts both heat and electricity well, so has many uses, including in electrical equipment such as wiring, motors and solar panels .

The Todagin Plateau on the edge of Imperial Metals’ Red Chris mine is thought to have the world’s highest density of stone sheep. It is the traditional Tahltan hunting grounds for moose, sheep, goats and caribou.

The wall of the Red Chris tailings dam is 105 metres high, about the height of a 35-storey building. Tailings are the byproducts left over from mining and include finely ground rock particles, chemicals and water. The rock particles and other chemicals sometimes undergo chemical reactions during storage that generate additional byproducts, such as acid, that can more easily leach into waterways.

In recent years, B.C. has experienced an explosion in mine growth on the Alaska border. Red Chris and Brucejack mines are now in operation, while KSM and Galore Creek have the required approvals and are in development. Schaft Creek is currently under review and four more mines are in the advanced exploration stages. Unlike Mount Polley, much of the waste in these transboundary projects will be potentially acid generating, making it much  more toxic .*

The Red Chris tailings pond is an unlined, earthen centre-line type tailings dam — the same design Imperial Metals used at the ill-fated Mount Polley mine. An independent panel that reviewed the Mount Polley spill predicted two additional tailings dam failures could occur every 10 years in British Columbia if mine waste disposal practices aren’t improved. One of the panel’s key recommendations was for B.C. to move away from allowing liquid tailings ponds. There are currently more than 120 tailings dams across British Columbia.

When the Red Chris gold and copper mine opened in late 2014, it became the first mine of its type to operate in the transboundary region. The Narwhal (formerly DeSmog Canada) requested a tour of the Red Chris mine but was told by an official that Red Chris does not provide “unsolicited tours.” Red Chris is owned by Imperial Metals, the same company responsible for Mount Polley. The largest Imperial Metals shareholder is oilsands billionaire and Calgary Flames co-owner Murray Edwards, who organized a $1-million Calgary fundraising dinner for former B.C. premier Christy Clark’s 2013 re-election campaign.

The Mount Polley mine had a total tailings storage volume of 44 million cubic metres. B.C.’s massive transboundary mines require much higher volumes of waste storage. The tailings facility at Red Chris can store up to 305 million cubic metres of mine waste. Galore Creek will have a storage volume of 424 million cubic metres, Shaft Creek of 588 million cubic metres and KSM a staggering 1,213 million cubic metres.

Frederick Otilius Olsen Jr. is the Haida Tribal President of the Organized Village of Kasaan and chair of the Southeast Alaska Indigenous Transboundary Commission. “We have been trying for years to get the B.C. government to adequately address our interests and concerns, but other than nice words and vague promises, we seem to be getting nowhere,” Olsen Jr. said. “It takes a little wisdom, but sometimes to do something different, you have to do something you never did.”

The tailings pond at the Red Chris mine has a capacity of 305 million cubic metres — seven times more than the Mount Polley tailings dam, which collapsed three years ago. In the case of Mount Polley, British Columbian taxpayers ended up on the hook for $40 million of cleanup costs. No fines were levied and no charges have been laid against Mount Polley.

The Red Chris mine has an expected daily throughput of 30,000 tonnes of ore for the 25-year lifespan of the project. The Canadian government did not conduct a comprehensive assessment of the environmental impacts of the project, a process that would have opened the mine proposal to public input.

This is the view northeast across Todagin Creek, wetlands and Tatogga Lake with the road to Red Chris mine on the right. If any tailings escaped from the south dam of the Red Chris tailings pond, this is the point where the tailings would enter the Iskut river system.**

Melanie Brown, left, is a fourth generation commercial fisherman in Bristol Bay, Alaska. Heather Hardcastle, right, is director of the conservation organization Salmon Beyond Borders and a commercial fisherman in Juneau, Alaska. “ We share these waters and we share these fish. There has to be an international solution,” Hardcastle said.

Massive braiding and bars from glacial sediment inputs on the Iskut river. Alluvial flood planes such as this are highly vulnerable to disruption.

A view of what is called the “Grand Canyon” of the Stikine River. Considered one of the last truly wild rivers in British Columbia, its 600-kilometre length encompasses mountain peaks and glaciers and supports some of the continent’s richest salmon habitat and wildlife populations.

If you look closely at this photo, you’ll see the drill pads perched on the mountainside (low centre right) and camp (centre left) of the Spectrum GJ gold-copper project, located 30 kilometres west of the Red Chris mine. It is just one of many examples of the lengths mining companies are going to open new mines in the isolated region.

A helicopter nearly disappears in the expanse of this glacier near the Brucejack gold mine. B.C.’s glaciers lose an estimated 22 billion cubic metres of water every year, feeding the province’s rich river systems.

A view east across Brucejack mine site and Brucejack Lake. Brucejack is an underground gold and silver mine. It will create 300 permanent jobs during its 22-year life. Owner Pretium has taken steps to minimize tailings risks by backfilling about half its mine waste in a paste mixed with cement in the underground mine. The other half will be stored in Brucejack Lake.

The Brucejack mine required the construction of an 11-kilometre glacial highway up the centreline of Knipple Glacier. The glacier retreated 300 metres between 2000 and 2011.

The Brucejack mine encampment. Potentially acid generating waste rock from the mine is stored underwater in Brucejack lake.

Joe Williams is a member of the Tlingit and former mayor of Ketchikan Borough, Alaska. He is also the owner and guide of Where the Eagle Walks , a walking tour business. Williams worries mining in the region has affected the health of oolichan populations. “The Department of Fish and Game say we can’t fish it anymore, even when it is out in the bay. It’s a sad thing. Now none of my kids know how to make oolichan oil and we can’t get it for me to teach them.”

Red Chris Mine went ahead after Imperial Metals’ largest shareholder Murray Edwards helped arrange $150 million in loans and crown corporation BC Hydro paid most of the costs for the $746-million Northwest Transmission Line into the region.

The proposed KSM mine site is in the foreground with Brucejack gold mine in the background. KSM sits atop one of the world’s largest undeveloped gold reserves . Once built, it will become one of the largest gold and copper mine in North America, with three open pits and two underground mines. The project initially entailed  mining under an active glacier, but that glacier has now retreated. The project will require the construction of two 23-kilometre-long tunnels to deposit mine waste into a tailings impoundment. At 239 metres tall, the tailings dam wall for KSM will be higher than the Shangri-La, the tallest building in Vancouver and the tailings pond will hold 27 times more waste than was held in the Mount Polley tailings dam.*** 

The Tulsequah Chief mine, a zinc and copper mine close to the Alaska border, has been leaking acid mine drainage into the Tulsequah River since it was first shut down in 1957. Attempts to re-open the mine have failed, along with several promises to clean up the site .

Other jurisdictions, such as Alaska and Quebec, demand large financial securities, paid up front to ensure companies are held responsible for any damage.

“If we were to put the bar higher and require payment of financial securities ahead of permitting and ahead of mining, this would be one one way to get rid of the mines that would be marginal and you would end up with the mines that are safest,” Ugo LaPointe of MiningWatch Canada told The Narwhal.

Although most of the mines in this region have a life expectancy of 20 to 50 years, their toxic legacy continues far beyond. This contaminated tailings pond of the Premier gold mine in the Salmon Valley is one example. Originally built in 1910, it operated steadily for 50 years and sporadically for a few years after that. It opened again in 1989 to close once again in 1996. This toxic tailings pound is currently being upgraded to today’s standards so it can be reopened in the future.

A grizzly bear fishes for salmon in Fish Creek, Alaska, just downstream of the Premier gold mine.

Ketchikan, Alaska, just across the border from British Columbia has dubbed itself the “salmon capital of the world.” Ketchikan’s economy is based upon government services, tourism and commercial fishing.

The last catch of the season is offloaded and processed at Alaska General Seafoods in Ketchikan. Alaska’s fishing industry employs nearly 60,000 workers , of which nearly half are fishermen.

Salmon canning at Alaska General Seafoods processing plant in Ketchikan, Alaska.

The initial mechanical processing and canning of salmon at Alaska General Seafoods in Ketchikan, Alaska.

Chief Shakes Tribal House in Wrangell, Alaska. Coastal indigenous cultures are closely tied to salmon and have flourished here for more than 10,000 years.

Brenda Schwartz-Yeager is a fourth generation Wrangell-based Alaskan. As the owner and operator of Alaska Charters and Adventures , Schwartz-Yeager is a confident navigator of the ever-changing Stikine River. “What makes the Stikine so special and unique is its vast wildness,” she said. “We just don’t have many places of this size, and scope, and wildness left on the earth.”

Icebergs and Castle Mountain as seen from Shakes Lake, which feeds the Stikine River in Alaska. Traveling the lower Stikine in 1879, American conservationist John Muir called it “a Yosemite 100 miles long.”

— With files and additional reporting from Emma Gilchrist and Carol Linnitt

This photo essay was funded by The Narwhal readers like you. Want more journalism like this? Become a member today.

Updated on Oct. 30, 2017, at 7:05 p.m. PST. The transboundary map in this article was updated to reflect the fact that the Galore Creek mine is in the development stage, rather than operational as previously stated.

Updated on Nov. 2, 2017, at 10 a.m. PST to correct the lake in the photo to Tattoga Lake, not Todagin Lake. Thank you to the reader with the sharp eye who pointed this out to us.

Updated on Oct. 31, 2017, at 10:45 a.m. PST. The article was updated to reflect the fact that the KSM mine will no longer require mining under an active glacier, as that glacier has now retreated from the proposed pit area. The description of of KSM has also been corrected to refer to the project as one of the largest undeveloped gold and copper mines in North America, rather than the largest undeveloped open-pit gold and copper mine in North America.

See similar stories

An epoch fail: geologists strike down anthropocene proposal, despite ontario lake evidence.

Charles Darwin upset a lot of people with his 1859 publication On the Origin of Species. Like Copernicus and Galileo before him, Darwin radically revised the...

Recent Posts

Meet shannon waters, the narwhal’s b.c. politics and environment reporter.

With years of political reporting experience, Shannon is poised to bring fresh stories to the...

 ‘Hopefully, the story dies’: emails show North Bay officials reacting to reporting on plastics factory’s use of PFAS

Emails obtained by The Narwhal show city staff advising Industrial Plastics Canada on response to...

Earth Day first aimed to save species. To do that, we need to think about more than one

Stories of charismatic critters capture our attention, but often only after it’s too late to...

• Photojournalism Links

The 10 Best Photo Essays of the Month

This month’s Photojournalism Links collection highlights 10 excellent photo essays from across the world, including Tomas Munita ‘s photographs from Gaza and Israel, made on assignment for the New York Times . The work, coinciding with the first anniversary of last year’s 50 day war between Israel and Palestinian militant groups, consists of eight innovative stop-motion-sequences which take us to the streets, hospitals, and homes on both sides of the conflict, and provide an immersive glimpse of how the two groups of communities are coping, one year after.

Tomas Munita: Walking in War’s Path (The New York Times )

Brent Stirton: Tracking Ivory: Terror in Africa | Ivory’s Human Toll (National Geographic) Two strong sets of images for National Geographic magazine’s latest cover story.

Lynsey Addario: Inside the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Diamond Mines (TIME LightBox) Terrific set of images looking at Congo’s diamond mining communities.

Andres Kudacki: Spain’s Housing Crisis (TIME LightBox) Powerful three-year project on the country’s home evictions, now on show at Visa pour l’Image photojournalism festival.

Mary Ellen Mark: New Orleans (CNN Money) The legendary photographer’s final assignment, done ahead of Hurricane Katrina’s 10th anniversary.

Daniel Etter: Hands Across Water (Al Jazeera America) Moving series on a small Sea-Watch ship, with a rotating crew of just eight volunteers, trying to save refugees and migrants in the Mediterranean.

Sergey Ponomarev: On Island of Lesbos, a Microcosm of Greece’s Other Crisis: Migrants (The New York Times ) Dramatic photographs of refugees and migrants arriving to the Greek island.

Allison Joyce: Child Marriage Bangladesh (International Business Times) Heartbreaking pictures of a 15-year-old Bangladeshi girl’s wedding | See also Joyce’s other Bangladeshi child marriage series at Mashable .

Andrea Bruce: Romania’s Disappearing Girls (Al Jazeera America) The Noor photographer’s work shows how poverty and desperation drive Romanian girls into the arms of sex traffickers.

Matt Black: Geography of Poverty: Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 (MSNBC) Second and third chapters of the Magnum photographer’s ambitious project mapping poverty around the U.S.

Mikko Takkunen is an Associate Photo Editor at TIME. Follow him on Twitter @photojournalism .

More Must-Reads From TIME

• The 100 Most Influential People of 2024
• The Revolution of Yulia Navalnaya
• 6 Compliments That Land Every Time
• What's the Deal With the Bitcoin Halving?
• If You're Dating Right Now , You're Brave: Column
• The AI That Could Heal a Divided Internet
• Fallout Is a Brilliant Model for the Future of Video Game Adaptations
• Want Weekly Recs on What to Watch, Read, and More? Sign Up for Worth Your Time

Contact us at [email protected]

Environmental Justice , Mining , Photo Essay , Place , Rivers

Sand mining – a photo essay in koilwar, india.

This is the first ever photo-essay shot on sand mining in Koilwar, Bhojpur district Bihar. The sand mining nexus in Bihar is intricate and involves influential people at distinct authoritative positions in the government, administrative circles and mafia. As a result, photos of sand mining are highly inaccessible. Though several stories have been published on the issue, photojournalists have often been beaten up in their attempts to capture images. Puneet Gupta, Akashdeep Roy and Ashish Gupta have documented sand mining – sand diggers and their environmental impact during 2015-17. The most challenging part of this project was getting access – locals give information yet choose to be anonymous and are incredibly uncomfortable being shot. After sincere attempts over three years, the team approached sand-diggers in different seasons to capture the reality on the ground. This photo essay highlights the economic exploitation of the sand diggers, the environmental impacts of sand mining and subsequent risks to society.

Koilwar, a serene village in the Bhojpur district of Bihar, has seen significant infrastructural development in recent years . River Sone, one of the perennial tributaries of the Ganges originating in Amarkantak hills at Sonbhadra in Madhya Pradesh, runs northwards through the town, giving it a pristine, natural appearance. The river derives its name from the light gold-tone sand it carries. The sand of River Sone is one of the purest & highest quality in the Ganges – ideal for construction work. This fine grade, superior quality sand has transformed the village into a town with manufactured construction at every nook & corner, thereby mutilating its natural  landscape.  

As one walks by the riverside in Koilwar, one cannot miss bare-chested sand-diggers of different age groups disappearing into water for a few minutes and then reappearing with a bucket of glistening wet sand, loading their boats and plunging back into the river. Without formal training or safety equipment gear, these sand-diggers have been accustomed to the process since childhood. While a few of the diggers are local inhabitants, the others are migrants arriving from different towns in and around Bihar to earn a means of livelihood. 

The sand-diggers earn a meager daily wage ranging from around $6 to $25 USD, depending on the season. In fulfilling the monetary needs of their families, these sand diggers do not realize that they are at the receiving end of a never-ending state-corporate nexus between petty contractors, local politicians, police, administrative officers and the mafia. In this skewed power dynamic where the winners earn profits, the sand collectors on the ground take the biggest risks for little economic return. 

The sand mining business requires no inputs other than labor. Since it generates significant profit, the state government has legalized the business of releasing annual tenders to individual investors. Over the last couple of years, investors have started using machinery and mechanized boats to accelerate the entire process and earn rapid returns. During the July to September monsoon season, when sand mining is banned, multiple actors churn more significant returns by selling sand at double the regular price in the name of scarcity. Sand diggers enjoy a grand  time during these months of the sand crisis, where they end up earning the equivalent of around 25 US Dollars per day. In this entire business with millions of dollars of turnover, sand-diggers earn merely hundreds.

The sole protagonist of this grand network is sand, which due to its fine construction-grade is the underpinning for this business. Apart from the significant societal role that sand plays in India, its primary commitment is to nature. It serves as a natural filter with a critical water holding capacity. Indiscriminate sand mining through both manual & mechanized methods  brings about the degradation of river water. It increases turbidity resulting in decreased light penetration and reduced photosynthetic processes, thereby impacting the aquatic ecosystem, including the food chain and life cycles of zooplanktons, phytoplankton and fishes.

According to Dr Gopal Krishna of Patna University, when the government leases out plots to investors, the stakeholders expect an environmental impact assessment, which produces individual reports for their respective plots. The results, however, remain skewed without an authentic scientific assessment of the entire area by an independent team of experts. A lack of a holistic approach to environmental evaluation has led to the continued monetization of the natural reservoir by vested interests. 

In this web of sand monetization, the environment and sand diggers are at the losing end. The natural resources extracted from the environment by manufacturing processes cause irreversible damage that cannot be replenished. Though the sand-diggers gain a minor economic return, they continue to live in temporary homes with their families in and around the riverside – the zone likely to witness maximum impact during a natural disaster. They are the most vulnerable and disenfranchised groups likely to bear the environmental burden. The ones higher up in the social ladder – petty contractors, local politicians, police and administrative officers have the power to externalize the cost of the environment onto the most vulnerable social group – sand diggers.

Puneet Gupta is an Assistant Professor specializing in Photojournalism, Architectural Photography & sociology at Symbiosis School of Visual Arts & Photography. She started her career as a photojournalist and eventually moved to academics. She finds a thrill in amalgamating her creative calibre of photographic techniques with her innate research skills.

Ashish Gupta is a Special Photojournalist working with a leading English daily. He is a passionate documentary photographer who loves capturing human interest stories. He believes that his photojournalistic skills are at their best when he captures the plight of socially vulnerable groups, especially in highly inaccessible zones.

Akashdeep Roy is an interdisciplinary researcher in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Pune. He is growing as a political ecologist who delves deeper into understanding the hidden dimensions of human-elephant conflict.

Puneet Gupta, Ashish Gupta, Akashdeep Roy

Written by Puneet Gupta, Ashish Gupta, Akashdeep Roy

The photos in this article illustrate the hard life of the sand diggers, who barely earn enough to survive, while the corrupt local officials line their pockets with cash. Sadly, it’s a common story.

True sad story. Sometimes, I find it hard to locate myself in this cruel socio-economic hierarchy. Feel like oppressing and being oppressed at the same time.

Leave a Reply Cancel

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Your Name *

Your Email *

Your Website

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Follow SAGE

Subscribe to sage.

Designed by WPZOOM

A Toxic Legacy of Mining In Peru

Centuries of environmental exploitation in the small town have ensnared its inhabitants in a vicious cycle of displacement, irreversible health damage, and social conflict.

In 1982, at Chulec Hospital in the Peruvian city of La Oroya, my great-grandfather, Demetrio Cárdenas, passed away. The doctor diagnosed that the cysts were a result of his 35 years of work in the lead processing furnaces of the mining complex. Despite this diagnosis, the state mining company Centromin Perú never took responsibility. The case of Demetrio Cárdenas is just one among thousands affected by heavy metals since the opening of the metallurgical complex in La Oroya in 1922.

La Oroya is a small town located at 4000 meters above sea level, in the depths of the Peruvian Andes, where my mother was born and where both my grandfather and great-grandfather worked as miners in one of the most polluted cities in the world.

This town is the capital of the Yauli province, with a mining history dating back to 1761. Centuries of mining activity have left a toxic legacy that has ensnared its inhabitants in a vicious cycle of displacement, landscape mutilation, environmental pollution, irreversible health damage, and constant social conflict between those dependent on mining as their sole source of income and those who see it as a deadly threat due to the high levels of heavy metals in the air they have breathed for decades, hindering the development of other economic resources.

“In La Oroya, we have seen adults and children fade away like a candle, with no hope of life,” says Yolanda Zurita Trujillo, a native of La Oroya and a former worker at the metallurgical complex.

At an early age, she and her father, Epifanio Zurita, a miner, saw their health deteriorate due to toxic gas emissions. Yolanda, along with her mother Victoria Trujillo, has dedicated her life to environmental activism, leading the demand against the mining company Doe Run Peru, owned by the Renco Group. Despite constant threats from those who yearn for the economic boom years that mining brought to La Oroya, Yolanda persists in her struggle.

Nowadays, the mining legacy that has deeply marked this land persists a few kilometers from La Oroya, in the desolate ruins of the ancient city of Morococha. Six families resist in solitude the displacement of the slopes of what used to be the Toromocho mountain. In just 14 years, the company Chinalco Peru has erased the mountain, leaving only a deep pit for copper extraction that continues to grow and pollute the air with dust containing metals, a result of the constant daily blasts executed by the mining company.

Here, where a mountain once stood, where there were towns and a vibrant life, everything has been altered by the extractive activities of foreign companies.

Just weeks ago, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights condemned Peru for neglecting to regulate the La Oroya mining complex, ordering the country to compensate for environmental damage and provide free medical care to victims.

The Stagecoach: A Photo Essay on Western Travel

Text By Gary Carter

Photos sourced by Western Mining History from various archives.

Author’s note: this is a short synopsis of early stagecoach activity in the far west. Please note that different sources may provide slightly varying numbers when describing coaches, men, way stations and animals used. The readers are directed to the bibliography for further reading and more in-depth information.

By 1917 over half a million Ford Model T’s were on the road, and rail service had reached many of the smaller towns in the West. But it was really the coming of the motor bus that finished off the stagecoach.

In Arizona, which was not a state until 1912, stage coaches were still carrying passengers to remote areas and small towns as late as 1917!  In tiny spots not receiving coach service, the buckboard was the conveyance to get potential passengers to the nearest stage station or stop.

While stages were prevalent as early as the late 1700’s in the East, it was not until the 1850’s that they became more common in the mining states of the West. The California Gold Rush and subsequent mining excitements in other western states meant increased population and the need for a vehicle to carry passengers, mail, bullion, and baggage. Shortly before and after the Civil War the military established a multitude of forts which needed mail and passenger access.

The one ton Concord coach and the smaller, lighter Celerity coach could seat nine (front, middle and back rows each sat three) and were the preferred makes. The three rows made it necessary for those seated in front and in the middle row to often interlock legs.

The ride was dusty, uncomfortable, hot in the summer, cold in the winter, windy and wet when it rained. The smell of four-six horses, unkempt passengers, cramped seating, fear of breakdowns, hostiles and robberies added to the anxiety.

Each of the passengers could bring up to 25 pounds of luggage, which were loaded into a leather pouch (aka boot) at the rear. If there was room, for a cheaper fare, and on short runs some folks took their chances on the top of the stage.

The “roads” (a misnomer) generally followed the most easily accessed natural contours with a few rocks pushed out of the way here and there. The high banks at stream crossings were knocked down just enough so the coach could slip rather than fall down into the stream. Eventually the continual travel, especially of big freight wagons carrying ore, helped to somewhat smooth down the trail.

It was not uncommon for passengers to assist in pushing or exiting to reduce weight to get the coach over especially difficult spots. Many of the current paved highways and Interstates in Arizona and other western states follow or parallel what was an old stage road.

Western movies showing stages running full out into town were theater, as horses and mules were generally worked at a pace of four to five miles an hour less they tire. A driver and helper, often with a shot gun, handled a team of four to six animals. The animals were generally changed out at each stage stop, which was from 10 to 15 miles apart. Later, long runs of 40 miles necessitated carrying water and feed for the horses.

A common stage run in Arizona was from Phoenix to Prescott, often called the Black Canyon Line, a distance of 100 miles, at a one way cost of about $10. Since stops at small mining towns and animal changes were needed, a one way trip generally took longer than a day. The Black Canyon Line, depending on the day, made stops at Aqua Fria, New River, Swillings Place, Black Canyon, Tip Top, Gillette, Bumble Bee, Cordes, Camp Verde, Mayer, Dewey, Prescott, and Fort Whipple.

Stage schedules were quickly committed to memory as once a day or a few times a week were often the only times the stage went “up or down” the route. Stagecoaches, and the stations that serviced them, were vital links between remote mining camps, and part of the social fabric of the frontier West. Although stage stations helped keep the lines running, passengers often slept sitting up in the coach as most stations had neither the space, help or food to house a full coach of passengers.

Robberies were not quite as numerous as the western pictures depicted but the Black Canyon line averaged slightly more than one a year from 1879 until 1895. Wells Fargo, due to robberies, stopped express deliveries of bullion from the famous Vulture Mine, in Arizona, after 1884.

It should be noted that Wells Fargo, a key stage line in the west, did not own stages in Arizona since they had entered Arizona late and independents were already established.  The company did contract with stage lines to make express and bullion deliveries and ran its company owned coaches in most other states.

From the 1860’s until the late 1800’s, stagecoach lines proliferated, but many companies only lasted a short time. Expenses were high and many small, independent outfits competed for business, but unless a government mail contract could be obtained many of the lines went broke. The coach cost well over $1500, and repairs, horses, feed, drivers, and stage stop upkeep combined to make for high overhead. 

The Overland Mail Stage Route

So far the discussion has centered on independent stage lines linking small towns and mining camps, often in the same state. Through the 1840’s an 50’s mail, not passengers, was carried from east to west by private companies.  As western territories continued to grow through the 1850s and 1860s, more travelers headed west and mail carriers started catering to passengers.

The government offered an unheard of six year, $600,000 contract to carry mail with the stipulation that service should be twice a week in each direction and each trip was to be done in 25 days or less to carry mail from St. Louis, Missouri to San Francisco, California.

Enter John Butterfield, of Utica, New York. He already owned numerous stage lines in New York, won the contract and then invested around $1 million in building the new line and route which was sometimes known as the called The Butterfield Line, or The Overland Mail.

The coaches were also allowed to carry passengers who paid $200 to ride the one way – 2,000 plus miles. Much of the route, to avoid bad weather in the winter, crossed southern Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and then entering southern California and turning North, traveling near much of what is now Highway 99 and over to San Francisco.

It took over 4 days and 27 stage stops just to cross Southern Arizona.  A total of around 200 manned relay stations were established, over 1500 animals plus feed, 800 or so workers and 250 coaches were acquired to support the endeavor.  It was no wonder that a large government contract was needed.

The stage coaches for the long overland trip were often Celerity coaches which were much lighter, had less suspension, and were more open to the elements than the Concord coaches. Perhaps their key feature, for Butterfield, was that the Celerity was much less expensive than the Concord.

Passengers had no way to keep clean, or comfortable. Stops were quick and often to change horses without meals. If a station did serve food it was quite fast and unappetizing. Travel at night was accomplished by moonlight and at other times by driver judgement and memory.

Up until the late 1880’s the overland trip, because of Apaches, was much more dangerous through West Texas, Southern New Mexico and Arizona than other stretches. Butterfield robberies though were almost non existent as the area traveled was so remote and the company rule was not to transport bullion or precious cargoes. 

During the Civil War the government eventually forced the southern Butterfield route, because of Confederate hostilities, to be abandoned, and in April of 1861 a new more northern route called The Central Overland Trail was used. It went from Salt Lake City to Ft. Churchill, Nevada (near present day Silver Springs off 95 alt.). Travelers used it and the old emigrant trail to California until the Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869, which became the preferred mode of cross country travel.

Local stages still made short runs until the automobile and motor buses became popular and reliable. In remote areas the stagecoach was still a transportation option until the late 1910s, but ultimately the automobile prevailed and the age of the stagecoach came to a close.

Related: Stagecoach Photos From Mining-Era Colorado

Bibliography:

Hanchett, Jr. Leland J., Catch the Stage to Phoenix, 1998

Hollon, W. Eugene, Great Days of the Overland Stage, June ,1957, Vol. 8, Issue #4

Ormsby, Waterman L., The Butterfield Overland Mail-etc., Univ.of Cal. Press, 1991

Ring, Bob, Arizona Daily Star, Rings Reflections, 06/28/2012

Rozam, Fred, A., Establishing Transportation on the Black Canyon Route , see Buckboards and Stagecoaches, 1989

Some information was obtained by the author on trips to historic sites in 2012

I work in the Alaska mining industry. I sometimes get paid in gold, but the job comes with long hours and grueling conditions.

• Justin Peterson moved to Alaska to pursue mining a little over 20 years ago.
• The industry has similarities to Australia's FIFO work, but the conditions can be rough.
• The hours are long, but the money is good, and some projects will partially compensate you in gold. 

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Justin Peterson, a 41-year-old gold miner in Alaska who has built a TikTok following of more than 20,000 users . This essay has been edited for length and clarity. Insider verified his identity, employment, and salary.

I moved to Alaska from Oregon to find work opportunities in the mining industry about 20 years ago.

I focus on gold mining, but we also have one of the world's largest zinc and lead mines, as well as silver and platinum here in Alaska.

There's a growing TikTok community that documents the perks of working in the mining industry. Although many of these workers live in Australia, I've also built a following on the app by sharing my experience in the field.

But it isn't always glamorous. Working as a miner for over 20 years in Alaska has shown me the challenges of this career path long term.

The perks and downsides to rotational work

Rotational work in Alaska is the same as "fly-in-fly-out" in Australia . It's when companies fly employees to the mining site to work for about two or three weeks straight. Then, the companies fly employees back home for two or three weeks of rest and relaxation, referred to as R&R.

In Alaska, rotational work cycles can last up to six weeks with no break. Mining companies here fly workers from Anchorage or Fairbanks to multiple sites across the state. One of the most common sites is the oilfield of the North Slope.

Construction campsites, like the ones I've worked at, are nice but simple. Operations camps have full-time workers who run the facilities. Some offer amenities like basketball courts or saunas. But most camps have a recreational hang-out area and a gym. They also provide food and housing.

During R&R periods, people can travel or spend their time relaxing.

As someone living in Wasilla, Alaska, with a wife and an 18-year-old son, my travel opportunities are more limited because the cost of living here in Alaska is expensive. But if you live in a cheaper state or you're independent, the lifestyle may pay off more because you can spend more money on travel.

A lot of people who live in Alaska go riding, hunting, and fishing during their "rest and relaxation week." I like to relax or check out the northern lights .

Related stories

I liked rotational work because I could do my own mining during my time off. It was tough for my family in the beginning, but soon they saw that I was able to make more money and stack up my days off. When we were together, we were able to enjoy our time more.

The mining industry in Alaska is rough

The physical conditions of mining in Alaska are rough.

Winter is especially difficult. The temperature is extreme and can dip down to below -40 degrees. Companies don't usually pause work, and we're expected to work in these conditions.

In some mining roles, you have to dive dredge, which is a form of plaster mining. It requires workers to plunge into freezing water and use a suction hose to vacuum up the gravel on the riverbed. It's one of the preferred ways of mining because it's easy to set up. The best gold is often found sitting on solid bedrock.

Aside from the conditions specific to Alaska, the nature of this lifestyle is also tough. It requires a lot of physical labor which means getting an injury or getting sick could compromise your ability to keep a job.

After my first six weeks of rotational work in 2006, I lost a finger during my R&R week. It was before my first 90 days on the new job so I had to cover the medical expenses alone. Since I wasn't able to fly back out on time because of the accident, I ended up losing my job.

The money can be good, but it depends on the project

I did rotational work for a while, but I'm currently working in the support structure for various mines and oilfield development. In this role as a welder, I work six or seven days a week, but my current job has no "rest and relaxation" time built in the way FIFO or rotational work usually does.

At my current job as a welder, I make a little over $30 an hour, which is decent. I work around 12 and a half hours a day either 72 or 84 hours a week. In a week that I work 72 hours, I make about $3,500 before taxes. That comes to about $175,000 annually, assuming I work 52 weeks without taxes factored in.

I plan on taking about seven or 10 days off in August to see "The Strongest Man on Earth" competition with my son in Colorado. Those are the only days I plan to take off this year because I have to make up for a slow year.

I've made more and less than my current rate during my years as a miner. Jobs with a government contractor typically pay higher.

In other jobs, I made significantly less than I do now, but I was partially compensated with gold. It was an under-the-table sort of verbal agreement with my employer. During that time, I made just over $1,800 a week working nearly 82 hours a week.

Even though I wasn't getting a lot of money on my paychecks, I was able to keep a portion of the gold I found, up to 60 or 100 ounces depending on how the company did.

Gold is easy to sell in Alaska, and nowadays, you can get about $2,400 per ounce. I liked to sell it in small increments of less than $600, so I didn't have to include it in a tax write-off, but you can make more on a sale if you sell it in larger quantities.

My work opportunities are now limited

I've worked 12-and-a-half-hour days, six or seven days a week, for the last year, with only about 10 days off a year. I plan to do this for two more years to save money after a slow year in mining. Then, I want to return to rotational work to have more time to enjoy life.

I don't necessarily want to be working this much in these conditions, but this is the industry I entered and these are the opportunities available to me right now.

My dream would be to work at a remote mining operation camp, like Skookum Gold Camp and Chicken Gold Camp in Alaska, where people outside the industry can find gold and take it home. Then, I could travel during the winter to other mining locations around the world, like Australia.

Watch: How scrappers cash in on gold from your old computer

• Main content

Photo Essay: Portlanders Young and Old Celebrate Earth Day With Making Earth Cool

Under the pomp and ceremony of a costume parade on a beautiful spring day lay a deep reservoir of disquiet for what the future might hold..

On Saturday, a parade of Portlanders marched from Sunnyside Environmental School through quiet inner Eastside residential blocks, celebrating Earth Day with the pageantry of handmade costumes and musical accompaniment from Portland’s own Unpresidented Brass Band.

Led by a decommissioned fire engine, the procession of approximately 200 people—most dressed as animals and plants—drew neighbors and diners out to watch the passing spectacle.

The event was organized by climate crisis-focused art collective Making Earth Cool , Portland Youth Climate Strike, Sunnyside Environmental School, and Extinction Rebellion PDX (a local chapter of the global nonviolent civil disobedience movement), among others.

At the parade Angela McIlvain, Mel Shea, and Nora Colie—wearing their respective ensembles as a globe with sunglasses "Earthy," a yellow flower "Dandy," and a pink wildflower "Clover"—emphasized the importance of this event being a multigenerational gathering and celebration. Under the pomp and ceremony of families in costumes and the communal celebration of Earth on a beautiful spring day, lies a deep reservoir of disquiet for what the future might hold.

“The youth are going to experience a lot more climate change than we have,” Shea told the  Mercury . “There is an anxiousness to it, and we hope to help people not feel alone.”

More In Environment

Portland is Updating its Tree Management Plan, Last Edited in 2004

Portland Elections Office Finds Zenith Energy Violated City Lobbying Rules

City of Portland to Form a Designated Climate Commission

Portland's Plan To Spur Housing Development by Relaxing Regulations Has Political Implications

Portland Preservationists Think the Future of New Housing is in Old Buildings

Editors' picks.

THE TRASH REPORT: Debt Ceiling, Toilets, and Bears, Oh My!

Your Sassy-Ass Local Trivia Quiz About Famous Flops, Creepy Bird Lovers, and the (Hurrah) Death of Capitalism!

Portland Street Response Sees 700 Percent Increase In Workload After Citywide Expansion

POP QUIZ PDX: Creepy-Crawly Trivia About Portland Murder, Mayhem, and MONSTERS (the Type You Marry!)

Hall Monitor: Soft on Crime

Proposed Ballot Measure Would Tank Portland’s New Police Accountability Board

Popular articles, asbestos found in northeast portland fire debris, stoking neighborhood health fears, parkrose high school students speak out against planned freight development, the portland clean energy fund is fast becoming the city’s fiscal lifeline, just can't get enough, sign up for our newsletter for news recaps, updates, and more.

Support Portland Mercury

We've detected unusual activity from your computer network

To continue, please click the box below to let us know you're not a robot.

Why did this happen?

Please make sure your browser supports JavaScript and cookies and that you are not blocking them from loading. For more information you can review our Terms of Service and Cookie Policy .

For inquiries related to this message please contact our support team and provide the reference ID below.