The Price of Gold
- Thom Pierce
- Mar 16
- 6 min read
My 2015 portrait campaign, giving a voice to sick miners, stands as the primary example of the application of my work through framework, content and advocacy.
It allowed me to pinpoint a group of people who needed to tell their story, and present their humanity to the exact target audience who had the agency to do something.
The upshot was a powerful body of work that was credited as being instrumental in the decision to compensate over 140,000 victims.
In this post I will delve into the considerations behind the framework, content creation and advocacy.
The Framework
The Price of Gold came about through a friend sending me an article on the silicosis class-action lawsuit. The article contained no pictures of the victims, but it peaked my interest as a potential project.
I contacted the non-profit organisation that seemed to be involved (a small South African NGO called Sonke Gender Justice), and asked them if they could assist me in making an initial project.
Images from the original research project - 2015
This was published in the Mail & Guardian newspaper as "The Price of Gold: The Caregivers" and, off the back of that article, we decided to make a more complete version of the project.
The aim was to create an exhibition as an advocacy tool that would give a voice to the miners, and raise public awareness, at the time of the court case.
The framework for this campaign was right there waiting for me in black and white. The 2015 class-action lawsuit included 56 "named plaintiffs" who represented all the other sick gold miners in South Africa and Lesotho, approximately 200,000 people. The court papers, a matter of public record, contained the names of these 56 miners on the front page.
It made complete sense to me that I should find all 56 miners (or their surviving family members) to show the faces of the victims, and provide a platform for them to be heard.
Three public-interest law firms were representing the miners and, collectively, they had signed up this initial group of claimants. They conducted preliminary interviews and medical tests, so it was easy for me to access their contact details and locations. All I needed to do was navigate the rural roads and villages of South Africa and Lesotho to find them, photograph them and interview them.
This is the sort of project that I love because the base parameters are all laid out, the framework of the story is clear, I know where the project starts and where it ends.
After I made the project and it was published widely, the Open Society Foundation (OSF South Africa) asked me to come in for a meeting and offered to pay me to continue the project, to profile another 50 miners for them to use in their own publications.
I turned them down. The project was complete. The story had been told within the perfect parameters that it needed to be. To continue interviewing vulnerable people just for the sake of more content would be exploitative, putting them through unnecessary trauma.
Also, the meeting started with the unforgettable line "When did you realise your project was going to be "pure gold"? (I should have walked out at that point).
Monochrome portraits of the miners
The Content
Making The Price of Gold was tough. I only had 20 days to find and photograph all 56 people, and I did all of the driving, navigating and project logistics myself. The distances were extensive, through rural South Africa and Lesotho, where the roads are not always good, and the signage is often non-existant.
This was my one chance to get everything I needed so I stuck a Go-Pro on the front of the car and kept my batteries constantly charging through the cigarette lighter port. I recorded almost all of my journey as a timelapse video.
At each person's house I photographed them in three different ways:
An environmental portrait (the hero shot) - see the full gallery here.
A monochrome portrait on a white background (above).
A colour portrait on a black background.
I also asked everyone for paperwork, x-rays, work wear and memento's from their time on the mines for me to photograph.
Each person was also interviewed in their own language, filmed and an audio recording was made of each one of them breathing. I managed all of the content creation with the help of a variety of translators who I picked up and dropped off along the way.
I had to average 3 people a day to fit everyone in to the 20 days, so I had no time off at all. Every evening I got to my accommodation, transferred the photographs to my computer, edited them, transcribed the audio, translated the transcription and wrote and edited the stories. As the project progressed, I started sending final images to my printers in Cape Town so that the exhibition pieces would be ready in time.
At the same time as making The Price of Gold I was also completing a paid commission for a television series called 21 Icons. I was the audio mix engineer (a throwback to my old life in music and recorded audio) and I would pull over to the side of the road, download the content through my phone, quickly mix it on headphones and send it back to the production company. They had no idea that I was not sat in my studio at home!
At the start of the project I did not have a plan for what the exhibition would look like. I knew that it would be portraits, but my initial thought was that it would be simple portraits against a plain background.
As the days progressed I started to see the power of the environmental portraits (as I call them), the people in their own spaces, and the stories that these images told. It became obvious that these would be photographs that would grab public attention and build an empathy link between the viewer and the subject.
The Advocacy
The most powerful decision that was made for the first exhibition of these portraits was to switch out all of the lights.
The project was made specifically to show at the time of the class action court case happening in Johannesburg in October 2015. We were given a space at the central methodist church, directly opposite the court house, and we set up in the basement.
It was a damp, pungent basement with no natural lighting. My heart sank as I walked in, but it turned out to be an incredible gift, positioning the exhibition in a space that was reminiscent of being underground.
I printed the portraits out as large as possible for the space, approximately A0. And all 56 of them were lined up on tatty trestle tables, propped up by bricks. The stories were printed on cards in front of them and the lights were turned off. The audio recordings of the miners breathing were played in over speakers.
Each person who walked into the space was given a miners helmet and head torch. They had to view the images and read the stories with only the light from their own torch. As they left, they were given a book containing all of the stories and portraits.
All of this made for an incredibly intimate and immersive experience which left many visitors in tears and motivated to share the stories. The book itself was handed to the judges, enabling them to read the stories of the people whose lives they were making a decision.
All of the photographs and stories were made into a "press pack" - a simple downloadable folder that gave publications everything that they needed to run the stories. This was shared, free of charge, with any and every publication who requested it.
With powerful portraits and simple, compelling human stories it was clear that this content was going to get shared and published widely. True enough, the stories appeared around the world in dozens of publications; raising awareness and support for the class-action case.
Since that first exhibition the portraits have been shown in exhibitions globally, ten years later they still feel as relevant as they did at the time. With every new publication, a new wave of interest emerges in the plight of the miners with silicosis, and the issue of occupational health as a whole.
For the organisations involve; Treatment Action Campaign, Sonke Gender Justice and SECTION27, the attention that they have received through the publications of the photographs has been huge. They have also all used the content themselves extensively over the last 10 years.
Personally, the project has been one of the flagship campaigns in my portfolio. The amount of requests that I get from organisations who want to make a project "similar to The Price of Gold" is testament to it's impact.
The portraits themselves have won several awards and been cited as inspirational to other photographers, authors, academics, students and film-makers.
But most importantly the project achieved what it set out to do; give a human face to the victims of silicosis and provide them with a platform for their voices to be heard.
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