Looking for Gold

This photo was shot in one of the most surreal site I ever visited of worked for while.

Rinconda Gold mine is located in Southern Peru close to Bolivian border and is the highest

gold mine in the world (5,200m a.s.l.). There were living and working in that time almost

15,000 people including kids as you can see in infrahuman living and working conditions.

These are the poorest �miners� kids and women looking for visible grains of gold in dump

material from one of hundreds underground mines in the zone owned by local �gold-

boss�. They can find and extract gold (if they are lucky) for 5-10 USD/day. It is like -5

Celsius below, at night it can get -20, hard to believe somebody has to live this way�

Comments?

An educational photograph for sure.

the pursuit of something of no intrinsic value to assuage the needs of those with no conception of the value of life.

 

i didn't know there was gold in peru, can you buy claims if American?

Larry, Peru is 4th largest gold producer in the world. Yanacocha mine in northern Peru is a 30 million onz gold deposit, largest in South America and BTW, USA company Newmont is the owner (50%) and operator. You, being American (or USA citizen better to say), you can buy a mining claim Peru as anybody else can do, 3 USD per hectare. Hope, I answered all your doubts, however if you like so, you can write straight to my e-mail mirkal@photo.net and I'll be pleased to answer your questions.

Miroslav -

 

My comment was partially 'tongue in cheek,' as I find gold mining, gold rushes and gold in particular, to be a source of historical and continual human degradation - and would never participate in the absentee ownership of it.

 

As a student of my local California gold rush, it is very clear how the pursuit of gold here created an incredible environmental, social and political mess from which we have not yet escaped.

 

In the late 1970's, as now, the price of gold increased many times and send many working people to California rivers to pursue the 80%+ of the gold remaining in the Sierra Nevada. I made a documentary film of this, and learned much about the hopes and reality of the 'rush' mentality.

 

It is the hardest work I've ever seen, with little guarantee of results.

 

I hope to visit the mountains of Peru and Chile in my lifetime, as the images I've seen are beautiful.

 

Your image, by the way, is an excellent representation. I would say - classic, a masterwork like Carter-Bresson or Shahn or Lange.

Larry,

I never told you thank you for your reply and I would like to do it now, despite 14 years later. I completely agree with you, being exploration geologist for almost 30 years I have to say I hate a gold and everything related to this metal. I try to focus on "useful" industrial metals like zinc, copper, lead, tin and even silver. Metals that make a sense and being of tremendous use for human kind while gold only brought a greed, wars, suffering and humiliation. Perfectly stored in the ground we do everything possible to get it out, melt it into gold bricks with incredibly high human, political, environmental and ethical price in order to store it again in safe strong rooms in banks or national vaults. Thousand s tons of useless metal, all that likely 5,000 years of incredible superhuman effort, misery and humiliation of the essence of the humanity in order to fill in two Olympic size pools with metal nobody really needs.