Please support Karl Ammann in his fight against poaching and trading of animals.

Find out yourself: English website of Karl Ammann

Karl Amman ist ein Fotograf und Naturschützer. Er dokumentiert mit sehr verstörenden Fotos und Filmen (u.a. auf Spiegel Online) den Handel und den Konsum von Tieren, Elfenbein, Nashorn, und sog. “bushmeat”. Es sind  Fotos, die so verstörend sind, weil sie ungeschminkt zeigen, wie der Mensch nachhaltig seine Umwelt vernichtet.

Karl Ammanns Blick ist nicht der eines radikalen, weltfremden Tierschützers. Nüchtern dokumentiert er, wie Gier, Gewinnstreben und zutiefst alberner Aberglauben, aber auch grosse Not und Armut, die Tierwelt dieses Planeten ausrottet. Seine Fotos und Filme verstören auch, weil die mit lebenden und toten Tieren handelnden Händler nicht einen Funken von Schuld zeigen, weil Polizei und Zollbehörden gleichgültig bis korrupt sind, und jeder mitverdient.

Mehr zu Karl Ammann auf seiner deutschsprachigen Website.

Before Christmas, Dennis entered a raffle for a gingerbread house big enough to accommodate a medium sized dog. Clarice asked him what he would do with the house if he won it. His apartment was small. Where would he put it? “I thought he wanted to display it, like everyone else I know who has a gingerbread house does. But that wasn’t what he had in mind. He planned to invite friends over for ‘beer and house.’ He was actually going to eat that thing, with all its artificial colors and sugar. To be so cavalier with your health? To me, that suggests a lack of maturity, an unwillingness to take responsibility.”

Now Dennis wanted to join a club that met once a month to sample foods from different ethnic cuisines in different neighborhoods. He asked Clarice to join with him but she wasn’t interested. “I’m an eat-to-live person,” she said.

Even as a child, I was an ardent eater. My mother once called me a hedonist. In the woods, in galleries, libraries and theaters, I became greedy, intoxicated. I didn’t want to leave. If only I could take home and possess forever everything I saw and heard: trees—the textures and patterns of their bark, the gnarling reach of their roots, the way light caught their leaves; moss and toads; colors in a box of crayons, on paint chips in the hardware store, in freezer cases filled with ices and ice creams; music, dance, stories, the smell of coffee, the deliciousness of sourdough bread made with walnuts… Some nights, still, before I go to bed, I put beans, vegetables or grains in my crock pot and time their cooking so the aromas of chili or soup will awaken me in the morning. This morning, before I was fully awake, I remembered a book of Lucille Clifton’s poems that I’d borrowed from the library and placed on my kitchen table. And there was another book—stunning elephant photographs taken by Karl Ammann. I had that too. I woke up to the promise of reading and looking—of eating.

Clarice and I were at our friend Mayumi’s apartment. Mayumi had just served us tea her mother had sent from Kyoto. I didn’t want to introduce conflict into a lovely afternoon but I identified with Dennis. I felt impelled to defend him. ”If Dennis were joining a cooking class instead of an eating club,” I asked Clarice, “would you feel the same way?”

“No. I’m not into cooking myself but it’s active, creative. You use your skills to bring pleasure to other people.”

Yes, I thought, but a cook couldn’t use his skills to bring pleasure to other people unless those other people were eaters. Don’t cooks and eaters need each other the way writers and readers need each other? Wouldn’t an eater who nearly levitated when he saw pfeffernusse through a bakery window bring as much pleasure to a baker as the baker would bring to him? Why are cooks seen as active, useful and creative while eaters are seen as passive consumers? Doesn’t eating well require active use of our entire beings—our senses, our attention, our teeth, our stomachs, our blood? Isn’t eating creative? From asparagus, gingerbread houses, words and images, we create human substance and energy.

It wasn’t just Clarice’s disparaging of live-to-eat people that I silently questioned. It was the whole notion of living to eat versus eating to live.

I’ve seen pigs at Farm Sanctuary suddenly stop rooting in their pasture and stand motionless, alert. Had they heard what they thought they heard? Human footsteps approaching their barn? A trough being moved in the courtyard where they’re fed? They listen for confirmation. And if they get that confirmation—sometimes even if they don’t—they run to eat. They run faster than I ever would have thought pigs could run. Waiting near their troughs, they can barely contain themselves. They salivate and make a racket. I’ve seen turkeys who appeared to be sound asleep under a tree. But the instant they heard their gate open and saw a person heading toward where their food was stored, they sprang up and ran to eat. I’ve watched sheep graze in a pasture of fresh grass for hours, eating. With food, animals can sometimes be lured into carriers, tricked into swallowing medicine, coaxed out of hiding, convinced to sit, stay or pose for a picture. Food tastes good. Eating feels good.

When an animal’s eyes gleam as she eats, when she checks her emptied trough or dish again and again, just in case she left a morsel, is she eating to live or living to eat? Or are the two desires inseparable?

Salivating pigs wait for their troughs to be filled:

Fiona

Andy and Violet

Joan and Bob

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.