60 Minutes - 05/07/2023: Illegal Child Labor, Industrial Revolution, Photographer James Nachtwey

Episode Date: May 8, 2023

A Nebraska middle school’s concerns about the safety of its students led to one of the largest investigations into illegal child labor in this country. Scott Pelley reports. Bill Whitaker visits California’s massive lithium reserve to see why some are calling this the next phase of the Industrial Revolution. Photographer James Nachtwey has made a career covering the world’s most violent conflicts. He tells Anderson Cooper why documenting acts of compassion in the darkest times makes him believe in humanity. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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overnight shift. This was not a mistake. There's no way that this was just a mistake. How many miners did you identify? 102 miners at 13 different plants in eight different states. East of San Diego and south of Palm Springs lies the Salton Sea, California's largest inland body of water. Spreading east from the sea is a giant, mineral-rich geothermal field boiling with potassium, sodium, and lithium. The region is being called Lithium Valley, and it's about to change the auto industry worldwide.

In the darkest times and in the most dangerous places, James Nockway captures beauty and brutality, moments of hate and heroism, senseless destruction, and quiet acts of compassion. Mothers and fathers are my heroes. What they do for their children, how they protect them. Being in places where people have next to nothing, and yet anything they have, they offer to a stranger. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim.

I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and more tonight on 60 Minutes. 85 years ago, the United States outlawed child abuse in sweatshop labor, a scourge that Franklin Roosevelt called this ancient atrocity. So it was a shock in 2022 to learn that an American company, owned by a Wall Street firm, sent children as young as 13 to work in slaughterhouses. The disgrace was more disturbing because the company, PSSI, is vital to national food safety and its owner, Blackstone, claims to be a model of

management. Both companies say they had no idea they employed children in eight states, but it was obvious to teachers in Grand Island, Nebraska, who noticed acid burns on a child. are all the U.S. Department of Labor would give us. But two may be enough. Their hardhats read PSSI, for Packers Sanitation Services Incorporated, the nation's leading slaughterhouse cleaning service, with 15,000 workers in 432 plants, taking in more than a billion dollars a year. Not, it seemed, a likely abuser of children. It seemed possible, but not necessarily likely. And if it were possible, you know, maybe

it was someone who'd slipped through the cracks. Shannon Raboglieto is a 17-year Labor Department investigator who was skeptical, but she went to Grand Island, Nebraska last summer after a middle school told police about acid burns on the hand and knee of a 14-year-old girl. The student explained that she worked nights in this slaughterhouse on the edge of town. What did the educators at Walnut Middle School tell you? It seemed to be known within the community that minors either are or were working overnight shifts. They told us about children that were falling asleep in class, that had burns, chemical burns. They

were concerned for the safety of the kids. They were concerned that they weren't able to stay awake and do their job, which is learning in school. Because they'd been up all night. Right. Up all night at the JBS Slaughterhouse, an immense plant that produces 5% of the beef in America. JBS can butcher 6,000 cows a day here,

but each night the plant was turned over to PSSI for cleaning from 11 to 7 a.m. Shannon Rabogedo staked out the parking lot as JBS left and PSSI came in. And you really noted the difference in the appearance of these workers that were coming to work this late night shift. What do you mean? They were little. They looked young. She believed children were washing bloody floors and razor-sharp machines with scalding water and powerful chemicals. So Rebellieto returned with a team and a search warrant.

She says they found nine children at work, a revelation that triggered a national audit of PSSI. And what did you find? That this was the standard operating procedure, that there were minors employed across the country between the ages of 13 and 17 working the overnight shift. This was not a mistake. There's no way that this was just a mistake, a clerical error, a handful of rogue individuals

getting through. This was the standard operating procedure. How many miners did you identify? We were able to identify and confirm 102 miners at 13 different plants in eight different states. Do you believe that 102 is the full extent? Not at all. I believe that the number is likely much higher. Last November, the Department of Labor filed suit against PSSI. The company responded with this, PSSI has an absolute company-wide prohibition against hiring minors. It added, we will defend ourselves vigorously

against these claims. The statement said PSSI checks eligibility of employees, including this girl, on a federal database. But that database is well known to be abused in an industry that can struggle to find workers. The jobs are grim and dangerous, and so they are often filled by immigrants who are desperate for work. Some immigrants use false papers to routinely beat the federal identification system that is known as E-Verify. Employers have known for nearly 30 years that E-Verify is useless if the applicant has bought, borrowed, or stolen an actual ID, which is common. And in the case of the children, E-Verify was especially dubious. These weren't close calls. In some cases, there were 13-year-olds working, and they were identified by PSSI as being in their 30s. Just, it's not possible. In its statement when the suit

was filed, PSSI said in addition to e-verify, it has industry-leading, best-in-class procedures, including extensive training, document verification, biometrics, and multiple layers of audits. The system that they use automatically flags whether or not someone has certified that they are 18 or not. And what we found in our review was that it was regularly ignored if someone didn't certify that they were 18. Did any of the children tell you how long they had been working at the plant? Yes. And how long was that? We looked back at a three-year period, so we can confirm that they had minors working there as early as 2019. Four weeks after its vow to vigorously defend itself, PSSI settled with the government. It did not dispute the finding that it hired children. PSSI promised not to do so in the future and agreed to regular audits. The company paid the maximum fine of $1.5 million,

which was about 1% of its cash on hand. The settlement ended the suit, but it did not answer the question, why? The children's pay was the same as adults, so why hire kids? Jessica Lima gave us insight into this question and into the desperation of the workers. People, I know we need money to survive, to pay bills, to pay rent, but for me it's not. We just need, we just need a job. Lima worked for PSSI as an adult in another plant. She told us it was obvious some coworkers were children.

They have the age from, like my kids are right now. They, they should be in a school. They not should be there. For us, like adult, it's hard. You can't imagine for our children. It's not easy. Do you believe that the supervisors at PSSI knew that these were children that they were hiring? They know, but they don't say nothing.

Because you just need the people to get the job done. People to get the job done. People to get the job done. Jessica Lima told us turnover of workers was high in the tough overnight jobs, but there was never a let-up in the pressure to get the slaughterhouses open by dawn. In Grand Island, many are at fault. In county court, two parents have been convicted of child abuse or endangerment for sending kids to the plant. A mother was sentenced to 60 days. There's a lot of blame. And in this audio recording, a stepfather is being sentenced to 30 days by Judge Arthur Wetzel.

Obviously, the company that employed this young lady has substantial blame, forcing young children to work on a kill floor at a beef packing plant, taking false identification that the young lady was 22 years of age when, in fact fact she was 14. There's blame to be passed upon the mother who obtained the false documents so her child could work. Also the elephant in the room, JBS, is at blame for hiring a cleaning company such as this to conduct their affairs and their plan. Parents purchased false identities, children were coached to lie. But it was up to PSSI to ensure its operations didn't create a market for child labor. In its defense, a top PSSI official told us off camera, we own this. We know we made some mistakes. It's inexcusable.

PSSI now says it has fired more than three dozen local managers. The sheer nature, the systemic failures, I've never seen systemic failures like this. The violations across the board at all of these different locations, I've never seen something like that. For all the years the investigation found child labor, PSSI has been owned by Wall Street's Blackstone, the largest private equity firm in the world. Blackstone told us, extensive pre-investment due diligence showed PSSI had industry-leading hiring compliance. But it seems that diligence failed to find what was obvious to investigators watching a shift change in a parking lot.

Still, the investment giant says a claim of insufficient diligence or oversight is simply false. And yet, 102 children labored at 13 slaughterhouses in eight states. We're really, really outraged and concerned that this is happening in the country today. Jessica Luhmann heads the Labor Department's Wage and Hour Division in charge of enforcement. In your view, is this billionaires making profits off the sweat of children? This was a systemic problem that was happening at PSSI.

And we have to think about what this means for our communities, what this means for our economy, and what we at the Department of Labor and across this administration are adamant about is that we will never rebuild our economy on the backs of children. Sounds like the 19th century. This is happening in 2022, 2023, that we have kids working in meatpacking factories, and we should all be outraged. Hard to imagine the callousness that is required. It makes us all question what's going wrong. Neither Blackstone nor PSSI would make a corporate officer available for an on-camera interview.

PSSI offered an attorney hired after the Labor Department filed suit, but he had no firsthand knowledge of the hiring of children. Today, PSSI has a new CEO. It pledges to, among other things, spend $10 million on the welfare of children. In Grand Island, the slaughterhouse owner, JBS, told us it didn't know children worked in its plant. JBS and other meatpackers have fired PSSI at more than two dozen sites. PSSI told us, we are 100% committed to enforcing our absolute prohibition against hiring children. As for the child workers in Grand Island, privacy laws prevent officials from telling us much, but we do know one child is in foster care and others are with their parents. You know, I wonder, after speaking to

these children, after exposing what was happening to them, what is your hope for them now? I hope that they're safe. I hope that they have an opportunity to be kids, to go to school and not be tired. And if they're working, I just hope that they're able to work in a safe environment. to help you earn the most PC Optimum points everywhere you shop. The PC Insider's World Elite MasterCard, the card for living unlimited. Conditions apply to all benefits. Visit PCFinancial.ca for details. Wendy's most important deal of the day has a fresh lineup. Pick any two breakfast items for $4.

New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small hot coffee, and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. The transition from fossil fuels to sustainable electric power has gone mainstream, most visibly in the auto industry. The major car companies are chasing Tesla with ambitious plans for fleets of electric vehicles. Those cars and trucks run on lithium batteries. The U.S. has

massive quantities of lithium, but has been slow to invest in the mining and extraction of the metal. That's about to change. Lithium operations powered by clean energy are being developed in a long-neglected, impoverished part of California by the Salton Sea, not far from the Mexican border. The region is being called Lithium Valley, and just like the 1849 gold rush, companies are racing to strike it rich. East of San Diego and south of Palm Springs lies the Salton Sea, California's largest inland body of water. Spreading east from the sea is a giant, underground, mineral-rich geothermal field boiling with potassium, sodium, and lithium. It is a world-class lithium resource.

This is. When you hear estimates of how big this resource could be, it's usually measured on annual tons produced. And we're confident that this is in excess of 300,000 tons a year. Right now, that's way more than half of the world's supply of lithium. Eric Spomer is CEO of Energy Source Minerals, a company based by the Salton Sea in California's Imperial Valley. It's steaming ahead with plans to recover lithium using an existing electric plant, powered by the vast underground geothermal field.

We're moving into an era of green technology, especially with our cars. Where does this fit in? Our more conservative projection would support seven and a half million electric vehicles a year, which is half of the total U.S. car sales, cars and trucks. Coming from the Salton Sea area? Correct. What about this plant? This plant will be 20,000 tons per year, which is equivalent to about 500,000 vehicles per year. Once up and running, the tons of lithium generated here will be shipped, refined, and processed into millions of rechargeable electric car batteries. Over 50% of our lineup and our retail sales will be from battery electric vehicles by the end of the decade.

Mark Stewart is head of Stellantis North America, a global carmaker that owns some of America's best-known brands, including Chrysler, Jeep, and Ram trucks. It really is, quote-unquote, the industrial revolution, the next phase, right? This is the most interesting and exciting time to be a part of our industry. Stellantis is investing $35 billion in an ambitious historic transformation. We're reimagining our factories, our assembly plants. They're already rolling our plug-in hybrids, as well as looking to two new battery joint ventures that are in full construction right now. The new industrial revolution? It absolutely is.

It's really the biggest technological changes in our industry in nearly 100 years. We were down in the Salton Sea region. They believe they can supply the lithium needs for all American car manufacturers. Absolutely. That is the case. Whatever they can produce, you guys will be buying it. We for sure will take as much as we can get and as much as we have already secured early. Lithium is key to powering electric cars.

The dense metal helps make batteries rechargeable. There's a lot of it around, but extracting lithium is dirty business. Most comes from rock mines in Australia, or as powder evaporated from mineral ponds in South America. The U.S. has one lithium evaporation plant in Nevada. Energy Source plans to break ground on a clean, billion-dollar facility here by the Salton Sea in the next few months. So the plant will fit in this spot right here?

Correct, that spot right there. That's not a big footprint. No. What are these? We call them the mud pots. And they are CO2 vents, hot CO2 with fluid that's bubbling to the surface. So this is evidence of the heat and activity going on underground. Correct.

The 600-degree geothermal brine that powers the region's electric plants comes from more than a mile beneath the earth. The boiling brine produces clean steam, which drives turbines to generate enough electricity to power 400,000 homes. In the past, the mineral-rich brine was simply returned to the earth. Now, Energy Source plans to extend the process and extract lithium from the brine before re-injecting it underground. Our process in combination with this resource,

will be the cleanest, most efficient lithium process in the world. And how long before the lithium processed here will be in commercial use in the U.S.? In 2025. A lot of the components that go into the batteries have been coming from anywhere around the world but America. Why was that? We have a lot of decent resources in North America.

They've just been undeveloped. David Deak worked for Tesla, traveling the world to find the best sources of lithium as it was building up production of its electric vehicles, or EVs. Tesla turned to the lithium-ion battery to power its cars, the same kind of rechargeable battery Sony first mass-produced for its camcorders. There was a new market for consumer electronics, but the vast majority is for electric vehicles. And that was pretty much triggered by Tesla? Triggered by Tesla. Also, you know, there's a lot of EV growth and EV demand and production in China.

That's been a big part of the global lithium demand story. Come on in. Deke is now EnergySource's chief development officer and says he had a eureka moment when he saw its unique technology. At the company's lab, Deke showed us the mechanics in miniature. The full-size plant will be 100 times larger. So what goes on inside this cylinder? Is it pellets or what is the matrix? Yeah, I think of it as beads in a column,

much like the activated carbon that you would find in a Brita filter. It works in a similar concept. A Brita filter will filter all impurities out of water. This sorbent is something that would only take in lithium and not absorb everything else. The system takes just a few hours to turn this orange brine into this clear lithium solution, which will be dried into powder. And this is what everybody's looking for.

That's what everyone wants. Here by the Salton Sea, Energy Source is leading the race for lithium. Warren Buffett's BHE Renewables runs 10 geothermal power plants in the region. And there's another on the drawing board by an Australian company, Controlled Thermal Resources. Both ventures are moving to tap the promise bubbling under the earth. CEO Rod Caldwell told us Controlled Thermal Resources had been fine-tuning the process at this test facility for 90 days. We're producing lithium from live brine here behind us. This is our optimization plant.

Based on what it learns here, Controlled Thermal Resources plans to build a new plant for recovering lithium, which costs about $4,000 a ton to extract and currently is selling for six times more. The noise is from the machines cooling 600-degree brine rising from the well, releasing steam. This is a battery-grade product from Salton Sea Brine. This for you is Eureka? This is absolutely Eureka, yes.

Rod Colwell told us this bottle of clear lithium chloride is the purest product from this test facility so far. This is the first time this has been in my hands. This happened last night, Bill. I might take that home with me. That's about $10 worth of lithium right there, so... You know it works. We know it works. The question here in the Salton Sea basin is,

will it work for everyone? This rich lithium resource lies beneath one of the poorest sections of California. The Salton Sea was created when the Colorado River flooded the basin in 1905. But for the past 50 years, the main source of water has been chemical-laden agricultural runoff. And for decades now, the sea has been evaporating and shrinking.

A once-thriving tourist industry has been replaced by environmental decay, toxic dust, and economic hardship. And with unemployment in the region hovering around 16%, there's a lot riding on turning the Imperial Valley into Lithium Valley. Governor Newsom called it, you know, the Saudi Arabia of lithium. I think, you know, it can change the landscape of the region. Frank Ruiz, the Audubon Society's local program director, is fighting to include the community in that change.

He was a commissioner on the state panel studying how the entire region can benefit from the potential underground. You're an environmentalist. How do you reconcile the industrialization of this area with saving the wildlife and the communities. We need to learn how to balance the tables. The lithium industry can be really good, you know, for these communities. It can, you know, it can provide better paid jobs. It can provide more job opportunities, especially for the younger folks. It can provide the revenues, you know, to offset the challenges that we have here at the Southern Sea.

Geologists predict once the industry is fully operational, the lithium underground should last for generations before running out. Good news for Stellantis, which ran out of batteries for its plug-in hybrid Jeep Wrangler last year. We sold out. What happened? If I could turn back my crystal ball bill, I would have secured a little more capacity for last year. To prevent that from happening in the future,

Mark Stewart and Stellantis have committed to buying lithium from controlled thermal resources at the Salton Sea, knowing it will be years before its product is commercially viable. We secured a large supply from them over a 10-year period because we are very positive on their technology. So is carmaker General Motors, which has invested in controlled thermal resources. The Department of Energy and U.S. automakers are eager for domestic lithium. The companies were stung when the pandemic disrupted the worldwide supply chain, stalling shipments of microchips, parts, and batteries. Still today, three-quarters of all lithium batteries are processed in Asia.

Current lithium, what typically happens, it's mined in one spot, it's moved across the world for processing and comes back. Think of all that additional cost, think of all that additional carbon that's being used to do that, and at the end someone pays for it, and that's a consumer. So will having this domestic supply of lithium help keep the cost of electric vehicles down? It will certainly help. Prices for electric cars are coming down and are projected to be on par with gas vehicles within a few years, driven in part by the tax incentives in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Eric Spomer of EnergySource told us the tax benefits have also been a catalyst for developing domestic lithium.

We're starting to see big announcements of investments to create that domestic demand so it doesn't ever have to go across an ocean. This seems like this is a game changer for American industry. It's a competitive advantage. It's an opportunity that we can be a leader globally. And why not lead? When Russia invaded Ukraine last year, James Nogwe packed up his cameras and Kevlar vest and rushed to the front lines. Nogwe is one of the greatest war photographers of all time.

Over the last four decades, he's covered nearly every armed conflict in the world. He was shot in the leg in Thailand, wounded by a bomb in El Salvador, a mortar in Beirut, and a grenade in Iraq that was tossed into a Humvee he was riding in. James Knockway is 75 now, and as we found out trying to keep up with him over the past year, still risking his life to capture images that may be difficult to look at, but important to never forget. In the darkest times and in the most dangerous places, James Nockway captures beauty and brutality, moments of hate and heroism, senseless destruction, and quiet acts of compassion. His photographs reveal the deepest and often disturbing depths of who we are

and what we do to each other. You've said that photographs can speak, and I'm wondering if you feel like you're helping give voice to some of the people you photograph. Well, many of the people I photographed are marginalized by the powers that be, that they're silenced, they're made invisible. So when someone comes from another part of the world and assumes risk to tell their story,

I think people see us as a kind of messenger. Nockway has devoted his life to telling other people's stories, bearing witness to their suffering and sacrifices. But documenting what he calls the insanity of war has been the core of his career. He spent decades covering conflicts in Afghanistan and the Middle East, the war in Bosnia, and the genocide in Rwanda, when as many as a million people died.

Some photographers have talked about their camera as a weapon. Do you think of your camera in that way? I think it's a way of looking at it, because in a way you might be fighting for peace or fighting against an injustice. And the way you do it is by informing people about it with the faith that people will want something done about it. In Ukraine, at the start of the war, Nakhwe worked in and around Kiev and Kharkiv for the New Yorker magazine. These are images he took in Bucha shortly after Russian troops pulled out, leaving behind the bodies of civilians they'd executed.

Bucha was horrendous. It was really like kind of butchery. In terms of brutality of all the militaries you have seen, does the Russian military stand apart in Ukraine for their behavior? Somehow the Russians have stood apart not only in Ukraine, but in Chechnya. Nakwe was in Chechnya's capital, Grozny, for weeks in 1995 and 1996 as Russian forces relentlessly bombarded the city.

The part that was inhabited by the Chechens was pounded into rubble from artillery and rocket fire and airstrikes for weeks and weeks on end with the civilian population trapped inside. They've taken that to Ukraine, but it's throughout the country. In Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine last year, we watched Nakhue as he worked photographing a man living in a crawl space under a building to avoid shelling. Months later, back in his New Hampshire studio, Ngoc Quay showed us some of the images he'd taken. What made this an image that spoke to you? The expression on his face.

If you really look carefully at his eyes, you can see there's terror in his eyes. He'd just been living in a state of terror for quite a while. This photograph was taken in a Kiev suburb of civilians evacuating across a makeshift bridge. These are split seconds that are occurring. You can be running and taking a picture. Quite often I'm running and I have to try and make a composition, get it in focus and catch the moment. People talk about your use of hands in images. Is that something you're conscious of? I'm extremely conscious of hands and eyes. I think those are the two most expressive parts of people.

This is a really good example here. That's the center of the picture. The old man's hand reaching for support to be held up by the volunteer. How many scenes like this have you seen in your life? Too many. Decades of Nacque's photographs are on display in a traveling exhibition called Memoria. When it stopped in New York, he showed us some of the 67 stunning images in it. These are the orphanages in Romania.

In 1990, Nacque helped reveal the shocking squalor and neglect in Romania's state-run orphanages. The cribs were just packed together. The children were in the cribs and they weren't taken out to play. They were almost like in prison in a way. His photographs, published in the New York Times magazine, helped lead to an international effort to rescue these children. How does a child who's about three years old maybe have a look like that in his eyes? Other walls in the exhibition were lined with casualties of war, a family mourning in Bosnia, a father protecting his wounded daughter from gunfire in El Salvador. Those are machete strikes. And this man, a survivor of a machete attack in Rwanda. He couldn't talk.

I approached him very slowly, and I just made eye contact with him, and I showed him my camera, and he allowed me to take the picture. He even turned his face more toward the light without me asking. That's important to you, that somebody gives their permission in a situation like this. I don't want to feel like I'm taking from people. I want them to feel like they're part of what I'm doing. And I think he understood what his scars would say to the rest of the world. Do you get depressed by it?

Do you cry? Do you get angry by it? Do you cry? Do you get angry? I'm angry a lot of the time. I mean, when I see innocent people being pushed around and bullied, you know, I fight depression. The things are depressing, but I think it's a sense of purpose that sort of drives me through that. You've said that you had to learn how to channel your anger as a journalist. I realize anger can just throw you off the rails.

So I channel it into the pictures. And I think my pictures have anger in them, but they also have compassion. It was this image and others taken by the legendary Life magazine photographer Larry Burroughs in Vietnam that opened Ngoc Quay's eyes to the power of pictures when he was a student at Dartmouth College in the late 1960s. Burroughs' photographs had a point of view, revealing the reality of war for service members and civilians alike. How did you start? I just started cold. I read books. I would create assignments for myself and I would go out as if I was working for an editor and practice. Wait, so you would just

make up your own assignments? Yes. I said, okay, I'm going to go out on a fishing trawler, you know, making believe, you know, I was shooting for National Geographic or something. He landed a job taking pictures for the Albuquerque Journal in 1976. That's his photo on the front page. But it wasn't until 1981, after 10 years of training, that Naquae felt ready to photograph armed conflict. He bought a ticket to Belfast, Northern Ireland, where riots and street battles were escalating. Did you know people there? I didn't know anyone. I was green. I just threw myself into it. His photographs from there were published by Newsweek magazine. I felt that I was in the midst of history as it was happening, and I was documenting it, and that was really an exciting feeling.

You were on the breaking wave of history. I mean, isn't that what photographers do? Because nothing's been written. A situation is happening. We actually don't know what's going to happen in the next moment. Anything can happen. His unflinching coverage of the civil wars in Central America in the 1980s cemented Nakwe's reputation and earned him a contract with Time magazine, where his work appeared for the next 34 years.

In South Africa in the early 1990s, Nkwe covered the violent end of apartheid and the blood-soaked birth of a new democracy. He was there when another photojournalist, Ken Osterbroek, was shot to death and two other colleagues wounded. We were down on the ground trying to not be targets of incoming fire, and you can see my hair part from the bullet going through my hair. You actually felt the bullet going through your hair? You could actually see it on the film. Here it is again in slow motion. As Nockway, in the white shirt, moved to reach his injured colleague,

a bullet, like a gust of wind, grazed his hair. You've come close many times to being killed. Is it worth it? For these images? It's not for any one image. It's for the job itself. I decided a long time ago that if I was going to do this, I would have to put myself at risk and anything could happen.

You clearly made a commitment that this was worth sacrificing for, worth sacrificing having a family for. I realized that if I were to pursue what I'm doing, and I was very driven to do that, I wouldn't be a good father, I wouldn't be a good husband, and all that would fall apart. I just didn't want that to happen. So I had to forego it. Naquay lives in Hanover, New Hampshire, where he went to college, though he's rarely there for long. His life's work, nearly a million images, has been acquired by Dartmouth, including his wrenching coverage of the opioid epidemic in the U.S. and contact sheets from the morning of September 11th. Naquay was just blocks away when the towers were hit.

So that's the first image? Yes, that's roll one. That's the first picture right there. The proof sheets are a silent reminder of the horror that day, but also reveal how Knockway works. He isn't just a photographer documenting destruction. He's a man in search of meaning. About a block and a half from the South Tower was a small Roman Catholic church with a cross on the top. And I thought that was an interesting

way of framing it. It somehow indicated the cultural difference between who was being attacked and who was doing the attacking. And as I was photographing it, the tower fell. That's what's happening right here. It starts collapsing as I was photographing it, the tower fell. That's what's happening right here. It starts collapsing as I'm photographing it. And all of this debris, these giant girders that must have weighed tons, were flying through the air. You were about to get killed. So I found my way into the lee of a building and it all flew over me. Decades of close calls have taken their toll on James Knockway. His hearing is damaged and he has grenade shrapnel in his

knees, stomach and face. But he has no plans on retiring and still finds reasons to hope in his camera's viewfinder. The look of just utter joy. As in this image of Nelson Mandela on the eve of his election as South Africa's first black president in 1994.

His fist in the air, which is a symbol of both triumph and defiance. And this one, taken two years earlier, of South African children playing on a trampoline. What made you take this picture? There's something about the innocence of children that's transcendent. And to bounce on a trampoline, I think that you get to the height of your jump, and then for a moment, you defy gravity. And I think that's the feeling that I wanted to get in this picture, that they're transcending the weight that has been on their society. Perhaps in the end, that is what James Knockway shows us in his work, that we are all capable of transcending our circumstances and ourselves. We can commit terrible acts of brutality and barbarism,

but also stunning acts of kindness and caring. Are you optimistic about the human species? I mean, you see the worst in people. I don't know if optimism is exactly the right word, but in these horrible situations, we see everyday citizens doing remarkable things for each other. Mothers and fathers are my heroes. What they do for their children, how they protect them. Being in places where people have next to nothing, and yet anything they have, they offer to a stranger.

Those are the things that we all have and that are displayed in the worst situations that makes me believe in humanity. Now, the last minute of 60 Minutes. Next Sunday on 60 Minutes, our new correspondent, Cecilia Vega, heads for the Caribbean island of Dominica, home of a rare population of sperm whales.

She dives right in for a close-up look at the whales and the effort to protect them by establishing a marine reserve where fishing and other harmful activities are banned. There is a sense of awe that comes with being in there. Every single time. Yeah. She was looking right at us. I'm Scott Pelley. We'll be back next week with Cecilia Vega's first story on another edition of 60 Minutes.