Essay: Six pictures of paradise

A June 2014 essay in Nautilus.

"Over the next few months I spent a lot of time looking at Struth’s pictures. To tell the truth, I needed the distraction. Having reached their apogee, things at the station had begun to run rapidly downhill. We had started to run out of money, or had finished running out of money, or had run out of money the year before and not realized it—the accountants in Cusco were trying to figure out which. The fundraising notes I sent out were meeting stiff competition in the form of that year’s headlines, which were about global economic collapse. The laboratory roof was leaking, the dining hall roof was leaking, my roof was leaking, and the cleaning lady hadn’t had a raise in years. Gold miners had invaded station property and were converting a patch of our forest into a gravel pit; they smiled at our protests because gold was selling for $900 an ounce...."

Read the whole essay here.

Photo by Thomas Struth