"this world is under terrible threat, all of it caused by us. to me, every creature, human or nonhuman, has an equal right to live, and this feeling, this belief that every animal and i are equal, affects me every time i frame an animal in my camera.
"the photos are my elegy to these beautiful creatures, to this wrenchingly beautiful world that is steadily, tragically vanishing before our eyes. …i hope that [they] might have some emotional impact on people - that in a minor way, they come away more aware that there is a sentience to those creatures, that those animals are not so different from us."
[the third and fourth photos, for example, show elephants grieving; one of child at his mother’s side, and one of a herd at the skull of an elephant]
"the rangers in the photos are part of the team [of 300] from big life foundation, the non profit organization i started in september 2010 in an effort to help try and halt the alarming and massive escalation of poaching in east africa.
"so far, working within the amboseli ecosystem of kenya and northern tanzania [an area covering 2 million acres], the big life teams have successfully dramatically reduced the level of poaching and other killings of animals in the region. the problem remains rampant elsewhere.”
"ivory has gone from a couple of hundred dollars a pound back in 2004 to as much as $2,000 a pound today. you’ve got an estimated 35,000 elephants a year being wiped out. with about 350,000 to 400,000 elephants left in the whole continent of africa, the elephants will be gone in the wild within ten years."
photos (made on film without the aid of telephoto or zoom lenses) and text by nick brandt, whose latest book, “across this ravaged land”, will be out september 24
(via awkwardsituationist:)
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