IJEN, Indonesia - November, 1998

In East Java, Indonesia, hundreds of miners face deadly smoke to mine sulphur, or “devil’s gold.”, found inside the still active Ijen Volcano. They risk respiratory illness and death to haul 200-pound loads of sulphur up the crater walls to sell. Throughout their workdays, the miners battle toxic fumes and it’s common for miners' shoulders to swell for the weight of their loads. Running down the sides...

Starting in 2022, I partnered with the retired actor and playwright Mark Jenkins - who drove from his home in Douglas, Wyoming to see Bob Dylan perform in Denver in February, 1964 - to explore the new Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa. Two Seattle-based artists and Dylan enthusiasts, separated by a generation, Mark and I are traveling throughout Oklahoma exploring how Dylan's art influenced the way we see the world and what the state says about...

From the Yale Genocide Studies program:

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Work from 2005 on e-waste in China, then a center for the global trade in toxic electronic waste, much of it arriving in the Chinese port city of Taizhou. 24 hours a day ships arrived in the city's harbor carrying cargo of waste, including millions of computer parts. These parts flowed out of the port in trucks into the city and hinterland where hundreds of tiny work shops broke down the parts, melting off the precious metals and using acids...

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED November 1999. Photographs by Stuart Isett & text by Richard Lloyd Parry.

In the Seto Inland Sea, a miniature ocean of warm currents in Japan's south-west, is an island called Oshima which might have come out of Odysseus's adventures or Gulliver's travels. Its name means simply "Big Island", although from end to end it is...

The streets of Nanjie village, a model communist village in the central province of Henan, are usually deserted as villagers are not allowed to own cars making the village feel more like Pyongyang, than your typical modern Chinese town. It collectivised its agricultural production and industry in the mid 1980s - when the rest of the country was doing the opposite, introducing market reforms put forward by former leader Deng Xiaoping....

A two part photo essay on elephants and their owners who were forced in the 1990s to move to Bangkok to beg for donations and food from Thais to survive. The project was photographed from 1996 to 1999, working with a group mahouts I met living in an encampment off Phetchaburi Road. Thailand banned so-call urban elephants a few years after I worked on this project, published in several european publications and a Japanese magazine.

The...

Bangkok, Thailand - June, 1995

Bangkok’s ‘body snatchers’ are not found in a science fiction novel or horror movie. Cruising Bangkok’s streets in their distinctive white pickup trucks, the young volunteers of the Por Tek Teung Foundation are, in fact, the city’s first line of defense against the death and mayhem that terrorize the capital’s streets. In a city notorious for its traffic jams and inadequate infrastructure, the body...

Honored to be interviewed Dan Milnor as part of his Shifter talks on photography. Listen here:

My recent work for Site Workshop on the new Owen Beach project, now up on The Architect's Newspaper. A beautiful and simple project, redesigning a beach tucked away in Tacoma's Point Defiance park.

Photographs by Stuart Isett. Words by By Dave Seminara

Kurt Cobain felt bored and old. Teenage angst had paid off well, as the line in the Nirvana song “Serve the Servants” put it, but the fame that came with being the frontman of the seminal grunge band that brought punk to the mainstream was taking a toll. Cobain was considered by many to be the voice of his generation, but he was also battling depression and addiction, diseases that...

Photographs by Stuart Isett. Text by Ron Gluckman. November, 1996

Way out in the wild sulu sea, where robberies and kidnappings are commonplace and the law of sea pirates is the only rule, tribes of aquatic gypsies live their entire lives at sea, touching land only to die.

AS THE SUN SINKS ON THE HORIZON, a wave of anxiety spreads among the...

In 2013 I was invited by Korea’s national TV network Ariyang to join with other photographers, mainly from the Magnum Photo Agency, to travel and photograph the around the country. The show was called “In Frame” and one of my conditions for taking...