French Guiana photos in Harper’s Magazine
I am always excited when I have newly published work to announce, but this one is the most exciting, and I have been waiting a long time for this issue to actually come out, which is now in the February issue of Harper’s Magazine.
Some background on how this story, about illegal gold mining in French Guiana, came together. I first came across this issue when I was still living in Istanbul and I was thinking of a large project about modern era colonies. I was first thinking about Greenland, French Guiana and American Samoa. So while researching Greenland, I was put in touch with a writer who was working on a story there. This writer happened to live in Seattle, to where I was about to move back (I later went to Greenland and worked with another writer on a story about Greenland’s autonomy from Denmark). The issue of illegal gold mining in French Guiana is something I continued to researched and later applied for a fellowship at Johns Hopkins’ International Reporting Project, fortunately I was only a finalist. After actually doing the story, I say fortunately. So, I am back living in Seattle and I get together for coffee with the writer I first talked to about Greenland, and I mentioned this story in French Guiana. Amazingly, he not only was familiar with the story, which has never received much attention, but knows a writer who has been researching the exact same story, and he put us in touch. Enter Damon Tabor, the writer of the story. Damon worked up a magnificent pitch and sent it off to Harper’s. We also worked up a proposal to get a travel grant from the Pulitzer Center of Crisis Reporting, a great organization from which I received a grant to do a story in Somaliland in 2009. We earned the grant from Pulitzer Center and Harper’s took the story and in March 2009, we flew to Guyana and then bussed our way over to French Guiana, where we worked for one month, going on patrols with the French military, and looking for gold with the Brazilian miners. The trip was exhausting and mostly sleepless. We trekked through challenging terrain, slept in hammocks, ate French MREs and drank Amazon well water. It was a very wet and hot time in the jungle. It was also a challenge technically. My camera equipment was constantly being bombarded with humidity and moisture. Dealing with the miners was also a constant challenge. Arranging access was the biggest issue. I can’t imagine having done this story on my own, which is what I would have done had I received that fellowship. I am very proud of how this story turned out, with the story Damon told, with the support we received from the Pulitzer Center and from Harper’s.
The story is a great read, definitely worth picking up a copy.
More about the project can be found on the Pulitzer Center website
Also, more photos are on my website- http://www.narayanmahon.com/frenchguiana.html
And here is the tearsheet of the first few pages-
