The
Garimpeiros Project

The Garimpeiros Project is close to completion — but is not yet there.

Nine countries have been photographed in depth across four continents and numerous commodities.

Each country represents a complete chapter — a detailed, intimate portrait of a community of miners, their lives, their work, their families and their futures.

Three countries remain. All are expensive to access and dangerous. All three are essential to the book's completion — geographically, culturally and in terms of the argument the book makes.

The book will be 350 pages. Hardcover. Large format. The kind of object that sits alongside the most important documentary photography books of the last fifty years.

It needs to exist. And it needs funding to get there.

An estimated 280 million people worldwide depend on artisanal mining to survive. That is more than three percent of the world's entire population — concentrated in some of the most politically unstable and resource-rich regions on earth.

For the past fifteen years the world's wealthiest nations — led largely by the OECD and EU — have been intervening aggressively in how these miners operate. The stated reasons are familiar. Human rights. Environment. Conflict minerals. Child labour.

They are noble sounding objectives. And they have generated billions of dollars in consulting fees, policy documents, legislative frameworks and compliance requirements.

What they have not generated is meaningful improvement in the lives of the world's artisanal miners.

I have spent over 20 years in these mining areas across four continents. I have watched these interventions arrive and I have watched what they actually produce on the ground. The gap between the stated objective and the reality is not a gap. It is a chasm.

The OECD's Due Diligence Guidance — the primary instrument through which these interventions operate — is not a human rights framework. It is a mechanism to formalise, regulate and ultimately remove artisanal miners from the resources they are sitting on. Resources that the world's wealthiest nations need with increasing urgency as critical minerals become harder to find and more strategically vital.

Canadian gold mining billionaire Frank Giustra noted that twice as much gold was discovered in 1990 as in the entire decade between 2010 and 2020. The numbers for copper are similar.

The minerals are running out. Artisanal mining areas are among the last places on earth where commercial aggregations of critical minerals can still be found with relative ease.

That is the real reason the West is interested.

But there is a second dimension that rarely gets spoken about. Forty-five million economically desperate people — operating outside formal state structures, concentrated in politically unstable regions, sitting on top of the minerals that wealthy nations need most — represent not just a supply chain problem but a political risk. So the formalisation and regulation of artisanal mining is also a mechanism of political control. Making these populations legible to state power makes them easier to manage. And harder to organise.

The Garimpeiros Project is the first work to make this argument with the full weight of over 20 years of photographic evidence behind it. Not theory. Not policy analysis. Photographs. Faces. Lives. The human reality of what these interventions actually mean for the people they claim to protect.

That is why this book needs to exist.

I am an internationally recognised Australian documentary photographer, with more than 20 years working across more than 35 countries on four continents.

I have published nine large format hardcover coffee table books. Eight are sold out.

My work has taken me into some of the most remote and difficult environments on earth documenting large-scale and artisanal mining operations. This has included work documenting some of the world's highest altitude miners, an active volcano, conflict zones and politically highly sensitive jurisdictions across Africa, Eurasia, Latin America and Australia.

I have documented large-scale and artisanal mining longer and more extensively than almost any photographer working today.

The Garimpeiros Project is the culmination of more than 20 years of that work. It is not a book I decided to make. It is a book that made itself — one trip, one mining area, one community at a time.

I know this world. I know these miners. And I know of no other work making these arguments with this depth of photographic evidence and field experience behind it.

The Garimpeiros Project is not looking for institutional funding. It is looking for individuals.

Specifically, people who understand that the world's most powerful institutions do not always act in the interests of the world's most vulnerable people. People who have seen enough of how the world actually works — in mining, in resources, in development, in geopolitics — to recognise the argument this book makes as true.

People with the means and the conviction to back work that says so. Plainly. With evidence. And with over 20 years of photographic documentation behind it.

This is not a charity project. It is not a feel-good initiative. It is boots-on-the-ground visually extraordinary work that will be read, debated and discussed long after it is published.

If you have spent time in the Third World. If you have worked in resources or mining or development and watched Western policy interventions arrive and wondered — honestly — who they were actually designed to serve. If you believe that the world's poorest people deserve more than trojan horses dressed up as third world saviors.
Then this project is looking for you.