December 30, 2015

Lisa Kristine: Photos that bear witness to modern slavery

located:	Ghana
editor:	Ama Lorenz

"I'm 150 feet down an illegal mine shaft in Ghana.The air is thick with heat and dust,and it's hard to breathe.I can feel the brush of sweaty bodies passing mein the darkness, but I can't see much else.I hear voices talking, but mostly the shaftis this cacophony of men coughing,and stone being broken with primitive tools.Like the others, I wear a flickering, cheap flashlighttied to my head with this elastic, tattered band,and I can barely make out the slick tree limbsholding up the walls of the three-foot square holedropping hundreds of feet into the earth.When my hand slips, I suddenly remember a minerI had met days before who had lost his gripand fell countless feet down that shaft."

With these words photographer Lisa Kristine opens her speech at a TED event about modern slavery. For the past two years,  she has traveled the world, documenting the unbearably harsh realities of modern-day slavery. She shares hauntingly beautiful images — miners in the Congo, brick layers in Nepal — illuminating the plight of the 27 million souls enslaved worldwide.