LOCATIONS

Masquerading as a tourist camera, the stealthy SLR of the environmental-activist photographer documents the byproducts of wholesale wildlife slaughter and incarceration that are on display in the markets of Southeast Asia.

Now, as Earth seems to be racing toward hell in a handbasket, there’s a growing sense that photographers and publishers need to be focusing more on the world not in order imagery. Karl broke his photo stories in the open-minded European press, but many of his shots from the dark medicine markets and poacher crime scenes have the raw look of reality TV. You can’t show up sporting a press badge, a couple of SLRs hanging off your shoulders, and start popping fill-flash in these unfriendly conditions. Magazines like National Geographic were looking for the arty, composed image and in the late ’90s finally began running the occasional outtake photo and mention of the African bushmeat plague. Their dilemma: with the magazine’s stature, if they publicize the disaster, then the readership will want to know what’s being done about it; readers will want to see results. Ultimately, staffer Michael Nichols was allowed to show more grisly bushmeat photos in his articles on West and Central African forests. Still, the real-world crimes far outpace the limited media coverage.

From time to time, we’ve force-fed articles on depressing subjects by Karl, Robert Glenn Ketchum, Frans Lanting and others in Outdoor Photographer, though I wish we’d have done more. Karl’s activism always makes us feel inadequate. We’ve run portfolios of clear-cutting root wads in the Northwest, devastating land erosion in Madagascar, slaughtered gorillas in the Congo. Of course, they’re never reader favorites, but a few write and appreciate the point.

A few months ago, Karl e-mailed with a complaint relating to another favorite debate among photographers and our readership: reality in a digital photography world. Evidently, he had been trying to sell a book on elephants to a publisher and the question came up, “Why don’t your photos look like those in Elephant [by Steve Bloom]?”, which apparently makes liberal use of “digital enhancement” justified as artistic expression. In the past, we had stepped on some of these computer-art land mines at the outset of digital scanning and Photoshop becoming mainstream. Powerful digital tools were then available to those normally thought of as stewards of photographic truth. The ideal of truth, especially in modern media, has become the national subject of satire and skepticism, as parodied by Stephen Colbert’s popularizing “truthiness” in the American vernacular. But truth in the still image remains sacrosanct with serious photographers.

Above: The forests on the island of Borneo burn despite lip service given to their protection by government officials and claims of success by environmental organizations. The orangutan is the most politicized species destined for extinction.

I asked our editor, Rob Sheppard, if the Elephant book had caught any flak at the last NANPA meeting or if it was a hot topic with any contributors to whom he had been speaking. He replied in the negative, nothing was buzzing around it like the early experiments by Art Wolfe in his Migrations book back in 1994. Still, I wrote an editorial (“In This Issue,” February 2007) about the general subject of authenticity, and we subsequently received an e-mail from photographer Kevin Schafer reminding us that the “Last Frame” in the very same issue was a digital composite. This launched an impromptu conversation between Rob and I about one of our favorite water-cooler subjects: manipulating truth by digital means versus compositional means. I pointed out that, in reality, composition—as in how a photo subject is selected and/or cropped and/or presented and/or published (or not published)—constitutes a control of the truth that’s far less easy to detect than digital manipulation and is perhaps more manipulative of the truth. Kevin Schafer has made one of his specialties rain forests, including Costa Rica. Rob recently had visited the country and remarked how surprised he was at how little rain forest there was compared to what he had expected. He had driven past miles and miles of plantations, only to find pockets of natural forest. Yet, for both of us (I’ve never been to the country), we always had based our impressions on the wondrous images that we’ve seen from Schafer, Michael and Patricia Fogden and others. Rob recounted an NPR program that referred to this sort of imagery as “nature pornography,” one of those hyperbolic expressions to intensify the debate.