The ‘Imagemakers’ section investigates how a photograph influences our view of reality. This week: Looking optimistically at a killed rhinoceros.
The Environmental Photography Award, a photography prize from the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation, has five categories. The photo above, of a South African rhinoceros killed and dehorned by poachers, recently won second place in the ‘Change makers: reasons for hope’ category.
Reasons for hope. I had to think about that for a while. There is also a section ‘Humanity versus Nature’, about the relationship between man and nature and the negative impact of human actions on our natural environment. Wouldn’t this photo have been more appropriate there?
Emotional rollercoaster
That duality seems to be a premise of the Environmental Photography Award anyway. The Photography Award would like photographers to show us the beauty of nature and also pay attention to the climatic challenges we face as humanity. That means those photographers have to simultaneously capture hope and despair, joy and anger, progress and opposition. That emotional roller coaster is of course not unknown to today’s people, but still. How do you capture it?
As a viewer you have been warned in any case. One photo shows an enraged elephant in Gabon, who was irreparably hit by a train in a wildlife park (first prize in the category ‘Humanity versus Nature’, by Dutch photographer Jasper Doest). The next a beautiful ephemeral sea creature that lives in icy waters. One time you’re looking at a grieving whale mother with a dead calf, the other time at an intense portrait of a jaguar who hijacks a rather large caiman from the water. That’s what I say: rollercoaster.
And then the rhinoceros. Last year, the versatile British photographer Tommy Trenchard made an image and text report about the Wildlife Forensic Academy (WFA) near Cape Town, South Africa. This is a new training center where law enforcement and veterinarians learn, among other things, how to collect forensic evidence after an environmental crime, such as killing a rhino for its horn. For example, the WFA tries to ensure that poachers are tracked down and brought to justice more often.
A second life
Giraffes and lions that have been shot and killed are given a second life here, prepared and mounted, as awfully authentic training material. The rhino is therefore also a real victim, perhaps one of the 451 illegally killed rhinos in South Africa in 2021. But the blood in the place where the proud horn once sat and the crime scene with its eccentric vegetation and sandpit-like bottom – those are simulations.
Apart from the saddest reason, this environment is of course a paradise for a photographer. Like zoos and dioramas, the CSI Hall is a place where real life is alienatingly mixed with the artificial. You can play with that and that’s exactly what Trenchard does.
He photographed the scene with the rhinoceros from behind a clump of grass, as if he were lying in the bushes with his camera. He took a low position, the eye of the lens almost level with the empty eyes of the dead animal, as if to add to the drama. The white suits, the yellow license plates, the metal wall in the background – everything contributes to a photo that is surreal and fascinating, but also shocking and poignant.
I immediately wanted to know everything about it. And it was only after I read about the noble purpose of the Wildlife Forensic Academy and when I understood that the gruesomely killed animals can at least still play an important role in helping to protect their own kind, only then did I understand that you can also be viewed from a moderately optimistic point of view. Maybe even with a hopeful look, voilà, I care. Wildlife areas wither and rhinos perish, but I hope the ambiguous Environmental Photography Award will be around for a very long time.