“Any photographer covering issues of wildlife and conservation who puts their ego and commercial interest in front of those of their subject needs to seriously consider their motives.”
It seems simple enough. Pick up a camera, find an animal, focus on the eyes, and take a picture.
And yet.
Controversies dog nature photography, from staged photos to animals being photographed in captivity — captured, if you will — and being passed off as wild, to, famously, a stuffed anteater being passed off as the real thing and winning one of the most prestigious wildlife photography awards on the planet, only to have the awards committee claw the award back when the secret is revealed and the perpetrator outed as a fraud.
Some prominent nature photographers attract controversy more than others — serial offenders, if you will — and hardly a month goes by without some behind-the-scenes dust-up or other landing headlines in the mainstream media.
That’s especially true this time of year, during October awards season, when wildlife photography is in the public eye, thanks to shout-outs from mainstream media outlets as widespread and diverse as BBC and The Guardian to CNN, the South China Morning Post and Canada’s public broadcaster, CBC.
Enter David Yarrow. One of the genre’s most popular and successful luminaries in the wildlife photography field is in the frame — again — for “turning wildlife into an accessory,” as the photography news website Fstoppers put it.
Like his style or hate it — and there are vocal voices on both sides of the philosophical divide — he is a star in a crowded community. Yarrow commands big prices for his work, and can call on his friends and colleagues in New York and London fashion scenes, to fill out his wildlife portraits with everything from scantily clad supermodels to guaranteed exposure on the breakfast-TV circuit on two continents. Yarrow has openly invested much of his time and energy into fundraising for various wildlife charities and NGOs, no small consideration when fundraising and financing conservation efforts during the Covid-19 pandemic has become easier said than done.
Yarrow calls himself a fine-art photographer, not a wildlife photographer.
Ethics are ethics, though, and Yarrow’s practices don’t sit well with many nature photographers. They don’t care for triggering animals to get a reaction, or using captive game farms for posed shots, game farms that have a reputation for mistreating their animals once the cameras go away. Think Tiger King crossed with Vogue.
The simmering controversy boiled over yet again recently, after Yarrow photographed one
of the most famous, iconic tuskers on location in Amboseli, Kenya, framed by a topless model.
Yarrow has posted actively on social media to say that photographing wild animals in Africa has never been more rewarding for the photographer than right now, when crowds of tourists are thin-on-the-ground owing to Covid-19 travel restrictions.
Yarrow’s elephant shoot drew the ire of the NGO Saving the Wild, however, and members of the International League of Conservation Photographers, a member organization of professional photographers who put ethics before results.
National Geographic photographer Charlie Hamilton James likens Yarrow and photographers like him being more “ego-warriors” than eco-warriors.
“The term encapsulates not just the way these people approach their subjects, but also how they cast and caption their work,” James has said.
The issue isn’t limited to just one famous photographer and his work in high-end glossy magazines and collectible coffee-table books— it’s a global, worldwide problem.
One photographer-guide who runs expeditions out of Churchill, Manitoba told Fstoppers he won’t accept clients who won’t play by the accepted rules of conduct during his ground-based expeditions to see the area’s polar bears as they congregate around the town, waiting for the sea ice to freeze in Hudson Bay.
Yarrow for his part has been contrite, saying in a joint statement this past week that he unintentionally “put the message out there that it’s okay to get out of a vehicle to be in close range with a wild animal, and it’s not. That is when things can go dangerously wrong.
“I have a responsibility to convey that these were exceptional circumstances, with rangers present, and my narrative should have made that explicitly clear.”
Saving the Wild, the NGO that helped organize the photo shoot and who went public with their misgivings once the shoot unfolded not as they expected, noted that if a wild animal like an elephant caused someone harm during a photo shoot, regardless of whether that elephant was provoked or not, it would be put down, defeating the whole purpose behind the conservation message.
“It’s not philanthropy when animals have to suffer for the charity to benefit.”
The Latin name for elephant is Loxodonta africana, by the way, not Victima fashionista.
©Saving the Wild/Facebook
