Karl Ammann

Karl Ammann is one of those photographers dedicated to a particular cause, focusing on the illegal bushmeat trade in Africa.  His photographs are shocking and disturbing.  You know his photos are hardcore when the link to his photo gallery on National Geographic says “Warning: Photos include depictions of butchered animals.”  One of the photos in the gallery shows a severed gorilla head in a frying pan, next to a bunch of bananas.  A photo of his featured in the September/October 2007 issue of American Photo magazine depicts an emaciated chimpanzee orphan, a victim of the bushmeat trade.  Time Magazine writes, “Karl Ammann’s photography books are too gruesome for your average coffee table.”  In 2007, Time Magazine named Ammann a Hero of the Environment, crediting him with almost single-handedly raising awareness of the issue of bushmeat, “the slaughter and consumption of wild — and often protected — animals.”

On his website, Ammann writes:

“Like most wildlife photographers/film makers, I concentrated for two decades on illustrating the beauty and diversity I found out there [Africa]. It is what sells and it is what supposedly gets people to want to conserve it. However for the last decade I have become increasingly disillusioned with this approach to ‘conservation’. Although clearly only a minor component, it was and is not contributing to effecting any real changes. I actually might be doing the opposite, giving viewers/readers a false sense of environmental security.

I felt I needed to go beyond what I call the ‘World in Order’ imagery and present some of the other sides of the coin. I called it the “2×4 approach” of hitting readers/viewers over the head with some of the harsher realities. To say that it was and is a frustrating task is putting it mildly.

While the print media and its editors were generally more open minded, the worlds documentary outlets were mostly interested in success stories, happy endings and heros. Packaging the three was pretty much an outright sale. Destruction, finger pointing, eco criminals, conservation failure was and is not considered to be ‘entertainment’ plus it brings into the picture the real editors: the network lawyers which have no problem with the happy ending and success stories.

What was even more distressing was that the conservation establishment seems to be happy to tie in with this approach. Problems are welcome because lots of money can be raised offering ‘solutions’. However the fact is that most of these solutions do not seem to be working and nobody seems to be interested in independent audits or establishing if a different approach might be necessary/possible. I call it ‘Band Aid Conservation’: The natural world is dying of a terminal cancer and all we get to hear is ‘write a check we will deal with it.’ However this generally is not by accepting the realities and underlying causes and suggesting that maybe time has come for ‘radio or chemo therapy’. Rather, it is peddling another rather meaningless band aid in form of another protected area (paper parks), research, pilot, or community conservation project.”

Then the internet came along giving people like myself more of an opportunity to voice view points outside this envelope of censorship I found with the mainstream media – albeit talking to a still limited and it would appear already largely converted audience.”

Read more about Ammann’s views in his interview with National Geographic.

Nick Brandt

Nick Brandt‘s black and white photographs of African wildlife stand out from the rest.  The photos are hauntingly beautiful and lonely, as if the animal or animals captured in the frame are the only ones left on Earth.  The high-contrast portraits are elegant and clean, and are reminiscent of the mother and baby photos that hang in household nurseries, gentle.  There is a sadness in the quiet loneliness of Brandt’s work.

Clyde Butcher

What Brandt does for wildlife, Clyde Butcher does for landscapes.  Although his work usually features Florida’s landscapes, his “America the Beautiful” exhibition features sites across the United States, and is reminiscent of the work of Ansel Adams.  With the determination of William Henry Jackson, Butcher takes his large-format photography equipment deep into the Everglades and back areas of southern Florida.  From the wide expanses of land to the thick brambles of swamp, Butcher’s work display the real Florida.

Adams owes a lot of his early success to the Sierra Club– his photographs and writing were first printed in the Sierra Club Bulletin in 1922, and his first one man exhibition was at the Sierra Club’s San Francisco headquarters in 1928.  In turn, Adams did as much for the Sierra Club as it did for him.  In the 1930s, Adams took a series of photographs to Congress to lobby for federal protection of Kings Canyon and the surrounding Sierra Nevada, the Sierra Club’s priority issue at the time.  Adam’s advocacy work paid off in 1940, when Congress created Kings Canyon National Park.

In 1968 Adams was awarded the Conservation Service Award, the Department of the Interior’s highest civilian honor, “in recognition of your many years of distinguished work as a photographer, artist, interpreter and conservationist, a role in which your efforts have been of profound importance in the conservation of our great natural resources.”  He also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980, for “his efforts to preserve this country’s wild and scenic areas, both on film and on earth. Drawn to the beauty of nature’s monuments, he is regarded by environmentalists as a national institution.”

According to biographer William Turnage, the environmental issues of particular importance to Adams were Yosemite National Park, the national park system, and above all, the preservation of wilderness.  His photographs became iconic of wild America, and he became an icon of the conservation movement.

Every year, the Sierra Club presents an Ansel Adams Award to a photographer who has used their talents to further a conservation cause.  The Wilderness Society has it’s own Ansel Adams Award, which is presented to a current or former federal official who has been a fervent advocate of conservation.

Jackson is known for taking some of the first photographs of the Yellowstone region, while accompanying Ferdinand V. Hayden’s geological surveys to the area between 1871 and 1872.  His photographs helped convince Congress to preserve the area in some way and led to the designation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872, which laid the groundwork for protected areas around the world.  In 1873, Jackson’s photos were also compiled into a portfolio by the Department of the Interior and presented to Congress to gain funds for future expeditions to the western United States.

The history of conservation photography did not begin with the creation of the iLCP. Although it is true that as a collective of concerned photographers we coined the term and gave the concept new impetus, the idea has been around almost since the advent of the camera

There is a long legacy in conservation photography that has blazed the trail for the way we currently use photography for environmental advocacy – William Henry Jackson, Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter are among earlier photographers whose advocacy work, in one way or another, translated into the protection of special landscapes. Jackson’s 1871 photographs of Yellowstone, for example, provided the visual argument that convinced legislators to create America’s first national park, and since then, photographers all around the world have used images for advocacy.

How we use conservation photography today demands a higher degree of urgency, as the issues challenging our planet are ever more complex, pressing and devastating. Addressing these issues by simply making pictures and hoping they reach the right audiences is not enough. Photographers today must take on a very active role in finding ways for their images to impact the right people. Sometimes the audience consists of legislators and other decision-makers, others it is made up of influential people whose opinions and recommendations move attitudes; more often than not, we are trying to educate end users, corporations and extractive industries on the impacts of their activities and how to mitigate them. Rarely is the image made by a conservation photographer used as mere entertainment.

Today’s conservation photographers must strive to be visual activists – activism here defined as “the use of strong actions in opposition to or in support of a cause” – because if we fail to be activists, we will inevitably be merely “inactive”. The difference between making great images and making great images that work hard to protect our planet is what really defines conservation photography.

Cristina Mittermeier
President
International League of Conservation Photographers

There are times when conservation photography looks identical to nature photography–the wide, sweeping landscapes, or some majestic animal engaging in a natural behavior.  Then there are those times when the subject matter is far less beautiful or appealing, such as Joel Sartore’s photo of  frogs belly-up in King’s Canyon National Park, taken to raise awareness about the deadly chytrid fungus and the amphibian extinction crisis.  The photo was one of several featured in the National Geographic Magazine article “The Vanishing: Amphibian Extinction”.  It is in these examples that the distinction between nature photography and conservation photography is the most visible; conservation photography isn’t always going to be pretty.  It is photography born of need, not of aesthetics.

“As conservation challenges continue to grow around us, the need for the kinds of images that touch hearts and change minds also is growing,” writes Mittermeier.  She founded the ILCP in 2003, after realizing the pivotal role that photography could play in moving people to care, a critical aspect of conservation.

Mittermeier was moved by the work of Peter Dombrovskis, a Tasmanian photographer whose photography was instrumental in saving the Tasmanian wilderness. Dombrovskis wrote, “an ethic of the land is needed because remaining wilderness is threatened by commercial exploitation that will destroy its value to future generations.”

“His [Dombrovskis'] philosophy — that one should take not only images that endure, but images that call for the wild world itself to endure — has become a guiding principle in my career as a photographer, and it is in this idea that the spirit of conservation photography lives,” writes Mittermeier.

It is the motivations of the photographer that defines conservation photography.

Susan Sontag once wrote, “A photograph can’t coerce. It won’t do the moral work for us. But it can start us on the way”.  In response to Sontag, Mittermeier says, “Making the images will not get the job done. It merely gets us started. It is the passion, the ethical care, and the integrity that we put into them that defines the real character of the conservation photographer.”

Among his accolades:

• Guggenheim Fellowship
• National Endowment for the Arts grants
• W. Eugene Smith Memorial Award
• Leica Oskar Barnack Award
• Olivier Rebbot Awards from the Overseas Press Club
• Canon Photo Essayist Awards
• Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Journalism Award
• Award of Excellence from the American College of Emergency Physicians
• Photojournalist of the Year by the International Center of Photography
• Infinity Award for Best Photographic Book from the International Center of Photography
• Kraszna-Krausz Award for Photographic Innovation in Books

Richards is also a fellow of The Nation Institute, an independently funded organization, committed to a just society and the principles of the First Amendment.

One of Riis’ major victories was after his 5-column story “Some Things We Drink”, in the August 21, 1891 edition of the New York Evening Sun, in which he exposed the state of  New York’s water supply.  Riis wrote:

“I took my camera and went up in the watershed photographing my evidence wherever I found it.  Populous towns sewered directly into our drinking water.  I went to the doctors and asked how many days a vigorous cholera bacillus may live and multiply in running water.  About seven,  said they.  My case was made.”

The story led to the purchase of land around the Croton Watershed, potentially saving New Yorkers from a cholera outbreak (Alland, 1993).

In the mid 1890s, New York Governor Theodore Roosevelt caught wind of Riis’ work and wanted to meet him.  In his 1901 article “Reform through Social Work: Some Forces that Tell for Decency in New York City” in McClure’s Magazine, Roosevelt wrote:

“Recently a man, well qualified to pass judgment, alluded to Mr. Jacob A. Riis as “the most useful citizen of New York”. Those fellow citizens of Mr. Riis who best know his work will be most apt to agree with this statement. The countless evils which lurk in the dark corners of our civic institutions, which stalk abroad in the slums, and have their permanent abode in the crowded tenement houses, have met in Mr. Riis the most formidable opponent ever encountered by them in New York City.”

Roosevelt coined the phrase “muckraking” to describe the work that Riis and other journalists were doing to expose scandalous information.

To see examples of Riis’ work, visit the New York Times slideshow, “Jacob A. Riis’ New York”.

References:
Alland, Alexander. Jacob A. Riis: Photographer and Citizen. Millerton, N.Y.: Aperture, 1993.)

Businesses liked to hire children because of their small, nimble hands and because they could pay children lower wages than adults.  Children that worked rarely had the chance to go to school and gain an education, and many developed serious health problems as a result of the work they were doing.  Many child laborers were underweight, and some suffered from stunted growth and curvature of the spine.  They developed diseases like tuberculosis and bronchitis as a result from their work environment, like coal mines and cotton mills. The on-the-job accident rate was high due to the long hours of hard work the children endured.

“There is work that profits children, and there is work that brings profit only to employers. The object of employing children is not to train them, but to get high profits from their work.”

– Lewis Hine, 1908

Hine’s photography was instrumental in changing public opinion on child labor, and the fight for stricter child labor laws.  In 1916, Congress passed the Keating-Owens Act, which : a minimum age of 14 for workers in manufacturing and 16 for workers in mining; a maximum workday of 8 hours; prohibition of night work for workers under age 16; and a documentary proof of age (Kent College of Law).