For three a long time, photographer Guillaume Bonn has traversed East Africa, documenting how civilization’s quintuple threats of modernity, growth, inhabitants progress, armed battle, and local weather change have imperiled the area’s wildlife, habitats, and human communities.
Some of his most distinctive footage—initially shot on task for Vanity Fair—are these depicting camouflage-clad native rangers from recreation reserves, conservancies, and elsewhere, who danger their lives to fight felony rings of poachers searching for the precious horns and tusks of rhinos and elephants.
The result’s an epic new e-book, Paradise Inc., printed simply in time for Earth Day. Herewith, VF showcases some of Bonn’s most arresting pictures, which, within the phrases of the Maasai elder and peace activist Ezekiel Ole Katato, convey the “profound struggle…between humanity and the untamed.” The images, usually in jarring juxtaposition, underscore the merciless discount of Western “progress”—and the paradoxical harm introduced on by a half century of conservation and preservation efforts. As journalist Jon Lee Anderson writes in his introduction: East Africa, “in all its wondrous beauty and diversity, is a real-life repository for our collective sense of natural perfection, and a glimpse of temporal eternity. Just as determinedly, however, Guillaume wishes us to see the fragility of that paradise, the future of which now hangs in the balance.” —David Friend
