A precious element, not gold

While the Western news media have turned their attention to the humanitarian crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan, an exhibition of photographs now at the Museum of Tolerance illustrates another tragic situation existing to the south, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “The Curse of Gold,” sponsored by Human Rights Watch and on view through Nov. 2, calls attention to the exploitation of the Congolese people by warlords battling for control of the African country’s reserves of gold and other natural resources.

In one emblematic image, the head of a teenage boy is shown in the foreground, his weary countenance tilted back toward the camera below and occupying nearly half of the photo. His muted expression, just one eye showing, conveys his resignation to the hard labor on display around him in the persons of a dozen other miners like him, chipping away the hillside with shovels under an eternal fair sky.

This and other oversize black-and-white scenes of child soldiers, their victims and primitive quarry conditions were shot by Marcus Bleasdale, an Anglo Irish photographer who first went to the Congo to cover the civil war that broke out in 1998. He returned to document the conditions of near-slave labor that ensued as feudal tyrants sent the impoverished inhabitants deep into mines to dig out gold from the ground by hand.

Bleasdale’s photographs of the Congo, the former Belgian and French colony renamed Zaire by the late president Joseph Mobutu, were first collected in the award-winning 2002 book “One Hundred Years of Darkness,” which matched his photography with passages from Joseph Conrad’s Congo-inspired 1902 novel “Heart of Darkness.” Touched by the suffering of the people there, he went back to compile a new set of images that became “The Curse of Gold.”

In text and accompanying brochures provided by Human Rights Watch, the exhibition makes the point that the natural resources of this underdeveloped nation, which should be a blessing, have become instead the source of bloody conflict.

While the photos in “The Curse of Gold” are not gruesome, they reveal the effects of war and hopelessness in the blank stares of the refugees on the roads and teenagers bent at hard labor, the children on stretchers, the prisoners expecting death. Beautifully composed, the portraits nonetheless ache with the message of hardship and deprivation.

Bleasdale made the trip to Los Angeles for the opening of the show, along with Anneke Van Woudenberg, the London-based Human Rights Watch researcher assigned to the Congo. “Human Rights Watch had documented the abuses in the gold area in writing,” Van Woudenberg said. “Then we discovered that Marcus had the photographs. It made the project much more visual and much better.”

The purpose of the exhibition is not so much to showcase the fine art of Bleasdale’s images as to influence business leaders and consumers to boycott the Congo’s ill-gotten gold. “You go into a shop and ask a jeweler, ‘On that ring, where did the gold come from?’ ” Bleasdale said, “and the jeweler is going to tell you, ‘I have no idea.’ But at least you’ve started to make him think.”

Drawn into the world

“It’s kind of weird having a photo exhibition whose primary activity is not to attract people interested in photography,” said Bleasdale, who is 39 and in wrap-around sunglasses bears a passing resemblance to Bono. The irony is one he must be used to by now, given his career trajectory. Though he has won numerous honors including the Overseas Press Club’s Olivier Rebbot Award and the UNICEF Photographer of the Year, Bleasdale was drawn into photography from the beginning by world events more than by art school. An economics major and budding London investment banker, Bleasdale in 1995 abruptly walked out of his job trading derivatives for BankAmerica and headed for the war in the Balkans. “I loved photography, but I was an amateur,” he said. “I jumped on a plane, I was one of the idiots who started his career in the Balkans. Quite a lot of people did that.”

Though he found outlets for his work, he soon returned to London to study photojournalism for a year before setting out again to try to earn his living with a camera. With the support of a grant from photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand, author of the popular book “Earth From the Air,” Bleasdale went to Africa and confronted the Congo, a country almost six times the size of California with fewer than 300 miles of paved road.

Bleasdale traveled light, with a minimum of equipment -- one camera, one lens and 50 rolls of film.

He learned how to talk his way, usually in French, into the confidence of the young thugs who commanded the militias and whom he likened to urban gang leaders in the U.S. “They all crave legitimacy,” Bleasdale said, explaining somewhat improbably why the warlords allowed him to photograph their soldiers and the conditions in mines. “They pretend to be the representatives of the people.” But they are only paying “the people” a few dollars a day to dig out the gold.

The warlords sell the gold to unscrupulous dealers, who then claim it comes from a legitimate mine, Van Woudenberg said. “And no one asks questions. The industry must say we will only buy gold when certain conditions are met, and right now that’s not the case.”

But with enough publicity, the reasoning goes, retailers in gold might be subject to the sort of pressure that affected the fur market when consumers, responding to alarms of environmental groups, stopped buying fur coats.

“This is about the way we do business,” Van Woudenberg told docents at the museum during a briefing session the day before the show opened. She also told them that 4 million people had been killed because of hostilities since the civil war began in 1998, earning the Congo the dubious title of being deadliest humanitarian crisis of our time.

The exhibition represents Bleasdale’s own answer to the question, how does one make a difference?

His photos have appeared in National Geographic, Time, Newsweek and Britain’s Sunday Times Magazine, yet Bleasdale said he preferred to be showcasing his work this way.

“I consider myself a documentary photographer, others consider themselves artists, others journalists, but all of our work is a hundred times more effective allied with a group like Human Rights Watch.”

Both he and Van Woudenberg stressed that the elections held after the end of the civil war have done little to address the injustice. Some perpetrators of atrocities, as monitored by Human Rights Watch, are now top generals or ministers in the Congolese government.

“The victims are still there,” the photographer said, “still suffering, while the [warlords] are driving these big 4x4s, living in nice houses with big flat-screen TVs, sending their kids to wonderful schools. And the kid begging on the street is there because his mother was hacked to death by one of his child soldiers.”

Such images are thousands of miles away from the jewelry stores of Europe and North America, but “The Curse of Gold” is bringing them closer.