For six years I didn’t only collect stories from people who supplied their flesh on the red market. I also took pictures. Here is a small set of photos that appeared in the book. Above is Fatima whose daughter Zabeen was kidnapped from a slum in Chennai and sold to an Australian family through a network of unwitting adoption agencies. Please don’t reproduce these without my permission.   Click here to see the gallery.

Since 2000 more than 10,000 people have died and 150,000 displaced by a Maoist insurgancy in India. In 2007 I traveled to Chhattisgarh, India with Jason Miklian to report how a police-funded civilian counter insurgency called “Salwa Judum” had only made the conflict worse. Now with warlords, communist ideologues and out of control military forces there are few places for civilians to find safety. While this story never appeared in a major publication, a later version that traced the connections between the mining industry and Maoism appeared in Foreign Policy in September 2010 under the title “Fire in the Hole”

Click here to see the photo gallery

Can a tattoo stop a bullet? A centuries old thai tattoo tradition teaches that indeed, the sacred scriptures can have protective powers.  In 2007 I traveled to the remote wat bang pra temple to interview the artistic masters who have spent their lives perfecting the art. I reported the story for National Public Radio which you can listen to here. But what what is a radio story without great photos?

Click here to see the gallery of photos here.

Bangladesh shares a border with only two other countries: the republic of India and the dictatorship of Burma. With climate change threatening much of the low-lying country refugees will have to go somewhere. And India has decided to prepare for the influx by building a wall and shooting anyone who tries to cross it. In January 2011 I traveled to Bangladesh and India with Jason Miklian and Kristian Hoelscher on an assignment for Foreign Policy.  Click here to see some of the photos that we took.

The age of calligraphy died when British soldiers toppled the Mughal courts. It’s hard to remember that there was a time before the age of computers when penmanship was considered one of the highest art forms. Outside of a some particularly ornate wedding invitations and hand-written copies of the Koran there is little need for formally trained Urdu calligraphers. That is, except for one small ink-stained corner of Chennai where the world’s last hand written newspaper still churns out 20,000 broad sheets a day.

http://redmarkets.com/2007/02/the-last-calligraphers.html