Steve Cagan

Photographer
El Chocó, Colombia
Location: Cleveland, Ohio, US
Nationality: US
Biography: Steve Cagan was born in New York City, grew up in low-income areas of Brooklyn and the Bronx, and went to the Bronx High School of Science and City College. After getting a Master’s degree in US history from Indiana University,... MORE
Public Story
El Chocó, Colombia
Copyright Steve Cagan 2024
Updated Dec 2012
Topics Civil Wars, Colombia, Documentary, Editorial, Environment, Environmental, Photography

I am a photographer—what is usually called a “documentary photographer,” although I have some critical reservations about that term—living in Cleveland, Ohio. For more than a quarter century, my main projects have been in four countries of Latin America.

In early 2003, a Roman Catholic priest in Cleveland, Ohio, where I live—a long-time friend and social activist—said, “Steve, a few of us are going to a place you’ve never heard of: Bellavista, Bojayá, El Chocó, in Colombia. We’re going to participate in the first anniversary commemoration of a terrible massacre that happened there. But even though it’s about a horrendous event, I promise that you won’t get depressed. In fact, your spirit will soar.”

It was just as he promised. I almost immediately felt a great attraction to both the natural environment and the people of El Chocó. And most important, I felt that this was a place where I could make a serious contribution with my camera. And so, I have been back for a total of twelve visits so far, ranging from a week or so to five months at a time (that longest one on a Fulbright fellowship).

At first, I cast a very broad net in subject matter, photographing aspects of daily life of the majority Afro-Colombian and indigenous populations, and documenting what I came to see as an important and interesting everyday resistance to the many threats faced by the communities of the area. 

Over these years, and particularly in the last two years, I have come to see the value of focusing more narrowly on one topic that touches every area of interest in Colombia: the environment, threats to traditional cultures, local and family economies, human rights, the armed internal conflict and more. That theme is mining, and in the case of El Chocó, especially gold mining.

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El Chocó, Colombia, is an area of rain forest, many rivers and very few roads. The roughly 500,000 inhabitants, are about 85% are Afro-Colombians (descendants of slaves brought by the Spanish to work the gold mines), and about 10% indigenous.

Until recently the people here maintained themselves through economic activities including fishing, hunting, lumbering, panning for gold, and planting fruits and vegetables. Aside from the gold mining, almost all this activity was for family consumption. But since the 1990s, this environment was been tragically disrupted by the arrival of Colombia’s civil war.

The special (and all-but-unknown) cultures and natural environment of El Chocó are threatened by the violence and by plans to level the forest for agro-industrial projects. The people now confront great pressures to leave their traditional villages, pressures created by the violent civil conflict, by excessive lumbering and mining, and by plans to destroy their rain forest that nurtured and protected their cultures and replace it with monoculture, pasture and infrastructure projects.

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Large-scale mining—for gold, coal, precious industrial metals and more—is becoming an increasingly critical global issue, as mining threatens various habitats throughout the world. Some of the areas that have been publicized recently are Central America, Central Africa, Brazil, Chile, Canada, the United States and Colombia.

In Colombia, a variety of habitats are under threat from actual or proposed mechanized mining activities. My work is focused on the department of El Chocó, in the northwest of the country. This is an area of tropical and sub-tropical rain forest, an area of great rainfall—indeed, one of the wettest places on the planet—and a place of great diversity in flora and fauna.

In this environment, native communities thrived for thousands of years before the arrival of the Spanish, and Black communities, descendants of slaves brought here by the Spanish to work in the gold mines, have thrived for 500 years, living on the generosity of the forest, and developing cultures grounded in the impact of the rivers and swamps.

Traditionally, panning for gold was an element in the family economy of Afro-Colombian and indigenous people in the rain forest—but it was only one element. People planted, hunted, fished, cut lumber, all primarily for their own consumption, and panned for gold. Gold was what provided cash, needed for the things they could not produce themselves—tools, cloth, salt, utensils—and mining was a part-time activity.

This activity—which still goes on—has barely any environmental impact. The amount of dirt that is turned over is very little, and this is primarily from the existing river or streambeds. Holes are not opened in the forest floor, or if they are, they are very small and shallow. The artisanal miners do not use mercury or cyanide, as mechanized miners do.

In recent years, impelled by the sky-high price of gold, mechanized mining has come to this area, and with a vengeance. Scores, if not hundreds, of large backhoes have been brought in to open large pits in a search for the gold. The new mining operations represent a threat to the important delicate rain forest environment, and also to traditional cultures.

The environmental threats that the mechanized mining activities present include: the destruction of significant areas of rain forest, as the thin forest topsoil is pushed aside and discarded and large pits are dug; serious degradation of streams and rivers as many tons of silt and rocks, oil and chemicals are dumped into them; and air, soil and water contamination by mercury that is burned in the open air. 

The newer mining also produces profound social distortions as people abandon the range of economic activities—small-scale farming, hunting and fishing, and sustainable lumbering—that have defined them culturally and supported their families, to become full-time artisanal miners in the areas abandoned by the machinery.

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My current work is intended not only to continue on the broader issues of displacement, human rights resistance and day-to-day resistance, but also to document important aspects of the newer mining activity and its effects on the natural and human environment. While I have had success in entering and photographing in some open-pit mines, this is an on-going project, with much photography yet to be done. This application for a FotoVisura grant is offered in the hope that a grant will help me win support to continue this work.

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