#14 : ALLEYWAY WITH CHIMPANZEE, 2014

The transformative power of context, part 2:

The portrait of the chimpanzee in a river bed was taken back in 2003, but as with all the animal portraits in Inherit the Dust, it was never released. I had rejected the original portrait because I had hoped for more of an emotional connection with the chimp - that he might be looking at me.  

But here in the alleyway location, with his head bowed, he appears, in my mind, to be lamenting the loss of the world that he once knew, and the denuded world that is now there in its place. The photo of the chimp becomes much stronger, I believe, due to the context in which it is now placed. 

As always, the panel of the chimp portrait was placed on location (NOT dropped in via Photoshop) next to a semi-stagnant stream of fetid sewage (where perhaps a creek with clear forest water once ran?)

Technical :

Shot on medium format black and white film with a Mamiya RZ67 Pro II, the final panoramic image is constructed of several negatives to capture the wide field of vision, which were pieced together in photoshop.

The photo is published INHERIT THE DUST.

The reproduction in the book is 13x15 inches (32cm x 38 cm). 

The book is $65 but currently just $45 on Amazon at http://goo.gl/qB06yW.

Signed copies are available at http://goo.gl/uYGEsp at photoeye for $65.


#14 : UNDERPASS WITH ELEPHANTS, 2015 (Lean Back, Your Life is On Track)

The transformative power of context. What do I mean? Read on....

I took the good but unremarkable photo of an elephant mother and her calves a few years ago, but didn’t think it special enough to release. But when revisiting it for Inherit the Dust, I realised how much more emotional and impactful it could be in its new incarnation. Placing the photo as a life-size panel at life size in this setting, the elephants look trapped between the monumental concrete pillars, uncertain of where to turn. The elephants also appear to be, for me at least, connected to the humans to the right of them.

When I chose this location, I never expected that these people would also be part of the photograph. They are all homeless, even the mothers with very young children and babies, who sleep beneath this underpass encircled by a central Nairobi roundabout.

It’s hard to see clearly from this tiny image online, but most of those boys, some as young as 6 or 7 years old, were high on glue from the bottles hanging from their faces.

The poisoned icing on the cake in relation to the homeless people is the cruelly juxtaposed billboard beyond, featuring a well-to-do middle class African man leaning back in a chair in his garden, with the tag line beneath: Lean Back, Your Life is On Track.

My plan had always been that, throughout the series, the animals in the panels would effectively be ghosts in the landscape. With these animals killed or driven from their habitat, the people now living within these landscapes would be oblivious to the presence of the animals that used to live there.

However,  in the final photo of the series, I wanted just one person, a child, to see the animals in the panel whilst all around, no-one else did.

But I never for a second imagined that this tiny boy on the right would wander into frame, fascinated by these giant elephants, and touch them with what appears to be a stick held in his hand. 

I would like to think that the image of babies here being the only ones to see the panels avoids the dangerous trap of easy sentimentality. My reason for it being babies is this -  I think we are all born with a instinctual connection to nature, and as we grow up, many of us lose that connection, influenced, seduced and distracted by societal pressure, teen pressure, etc. Hopefully most of us will find our way back, but many will not.

Technical :


Shot on medium format black and white film with a Mamiya RZ67 Pro II, the final panoramic image is constructed of several negatives to capture the wide field of vision, which were pieced together in photoshop.
 

The photo is published in the book, INHERIT THE DUST.
 

The reproduction in the book is 13x27 inches (32cm x 67cm). The book is $40 on Amazon at http://goo.gl/qB06yW.
 

Signed copies are available at http://goo.gl/uYGEsp at photoeye for $65.
 

I would urge you to please buy the giant book, as these website images cannot begin to capture everything going on in the photos (the print at its best size is 120 inches / 300 cm long.)

 
#13 : WASTELAND WITH ELEPHANT, 2015

An elephant strides across the savannah towards camera. But where a sea of grass once was, all is human garbage.

The original photo of the elephant is a previously unreleased shot taken in 2008. A beautiful bull with the unlikely name of Little Male. He was speared the year after this photo was taken, but survived, and is hopefully still alive in the Amboseli ecosystem in southern Kenya.
 

A few hundred kms to the north is this dumpsite on the edge of the city of Nakuru. Elephants would have walked these hills several decades ago, walked across these plains and hills now strewn with garbage.

The people in the photo all live on the edges of the dumpsite, and spend their days scouring through the garbage for anything that they can use or sell. When the garbage trucks arrive, many will search through the garbage for food they can eat right there. I

t’s not just the animals that are the victims of environmental degradation and devastation, but humans also.

As with all the photos in this series, the life size photo of the elephant was printed at my studio in California, and then glued to a giant aluminum and plywood assembled on location. Multiple sandbags had to be used to raise up the panel so that the horizon line in the original photo lined up with the horizon line on the location.

I shot this and a few other panels close by over the course of a week, waiting for the right stormy clouds and accompanying light. One advantage of being there so long is that the local people became completely used to us being there, and just got on with their lives. I wanted it that way - for the people to be oblivious to the presence of the panels and the animals featured in them, who are now no more than ghosts in the landscape.

But not all is doom and gloom. Once up a time, we in the West had these animals where we lived. We blew it, wiped them out, but we still have a chance to protect and preserve the places and those animals where they still live, and at the same time help support local communities, through wide scale employment in nature tourism and wildlife preservation.
Go to biglife.org to learn about the work that Big Life Foundation, the organization I co-founded in 2010, is doing in this regard.

Technical :


Shot on medium format black and white film with a Mamiya RZ67 Pro II, the final panoramic image is constructed of several negatives to capture the wide field of vision, which were pieced together in photoshop.

The photo is published in INHERIT THE DUST (Feb 2016).

The reproduction in the book is 13x27 inches (32cm x 67cm). The book is currently $42 on Amazon here

Signed copies are available here at photoeye for $65.

I would urge you to please buy the giant book, as these website images cannot begin to capture everything going on in the photos (the print at its best size is 120 inches / 300 cm long.)