Australian photographer Hugh Brown crouches down in front of one of his pictures with a lump of pure sulphur in his hand.
The image framed behind him is of a sulphur miner arching his back and wearing a grimace of pain as he stands in an active volcano in Java surrounded by hardened lumps of sulphur.
"As you can see here, he's screaming in agony, because the sulphur in the air, when it mixes with the water in your lungs, and your eyes and your throat, it creates sulphuric acid, so that burns. The day this photo was taken, the miner was suffering particularly badly. Everyone in the crater was suffering particularly badly."
(Reporter:) "And yourself as well."
(Brown:) "Yeah, that's just the thing. I'm only doing it for a period of weeks, these guys are doing it for years on end."
The workers have very little protective equipment, and the techniques for extracting the resources are far short of those employed by mining companies in developed countries.
The Indonesian miners use a ceramic pipe to capture the pure sulphur gas, which is 600 degrees as it comes out of a vent connected to a magma chamber.
The gas condenses into a liquid as it cools, then solidifies around 120 degrees.
"And so the miners go in, and they haul this sulphur out in probably an average load of about 70 kilograms. To put that into perspective, the average weight of the miners themselves is about 55 kilos. Many of the workers do that two times a day. It's a one-kilometre haul out of the crater up to the rim. And then they carry their sulphur a further three kilometres down to a drop-off station, where it gets weighed, and a tally is kept as to how much they should be paid."
Hugh Brown has spent seven years travelling the globe capturing the reality of artisanal mining.
It is small-scale mining practised by individuals and communities, often in developing countries.
And it is hard, dangerous and potentially lethal.
The 46-year-old has navigated insurgencies and treacherous mountain roads in India and Pakistan and run from security guards and explosions in Burkina Faso and Bolivia.
He has braved the Mountain that Eats Men, where South American miners pray to El Tio, or the devil who rules the dark depths where they mine.
"Adventure's a critical component of everything that I do. It's just how I'm wired. I think I've always been like that. But it's not a Boy's Own* adventure. The subject is fascinating. There's 30 million of these miners around the world that most in the Western world know nothing of. So we live in our flash houses, driving our flash cars, drinking our $6 lattes, and a lot of these people around the world are earning less than one US dollar a day. So, for me, I think it's important the rest of the world sees that."
The former management consultant says he does not want the practice shut down.
Rather, he wants to expose the reality to people who take mining for granted, that it is not a highly regulated and relatively safe industry as it is in much of the world.
And he wants to show the developed world also benefits from the toil of the artisanal miners.
The World Bank says 80 per cent of the world's sapphires and 20 per cent of its gold come from artisanal mining.
Hugh Brown says there is also blood in those precious materials.
He has seen a Bolivian miner lose both legs when a loaded mining cart rolled over them, seen the devastating effects of silicosis, seen an Indian four-year-old die in an accident.
"And it took me probably three days (to recover). I'd wake up with a tear in my eye not knowing why, and then I came out of the other side of that and the point that I reached was that I wasn't glad that it'd happened but I was glad that I wasn't spared from seeing it."
And, again, that is why Hugh Brown takes his photographs of such an arduous industry.
He says he wants to bear witness to what so many people have to do to survive and how the lust for the earth's treasures is a universal human desire.
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