POACHING PICTURES WEBSITE

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Poaching Pictures

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Air Week of August 5, 2005

 

 

Patrick Brown tracks the illegal wildlife trade in Asia—with a camera. His black

and white photos tell the story of the business of trafficking animals--from the

small-time poacher to the tables at the marketplace to international airports

and Scotland Yard whose staff of four is charged with curbing wildlife

smuggling. Brown tells Living on Earth’s Jeff Young that he hopes to use his

work to educate some of the people involved in the business..

 

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YOUNG: Flip through the current issue of Mother Jones magazine and you'll come

across some startling black and white images of rare Asian animals. You'll also

see images of some of the people making these animals even more rare—poachers

and dealers in the illegal trade in wildlife. Photographer Patrick Brown trekked

through southern Asia to take those pictures and he's with us now to talk about

them. Mr. Brown, welcome to Living on Earth.

 

 

 

Thai officials seize a live pangolin at Bangkok International Airport. (Photo: ©

Patrick Brown/Panos)

 

 

BROWN: Thank you very much for having me.

 

YOUNG: You've been following the illegal animal trade for almost three years

now. What is it about this that holds your interest as a photographer?

 

BROWN: Well, I focused not so much on the animals themselves, but I photographed

more on the social implications of this trade and I wanted to try and feel and

get the information across to the viewer of what it's like to be these hunters,

be those poachers, actually switch the roles around because these guys don't

really know what they're doing so I'm trying to show the viewer a story of

what's actually happening on the cold face so to speak.

 

YOUNG: It does have a very documentarian feel to it, like you said these aren't

beauty shots of wild animals. One here that kind of jumps out at me, it's a

stall in what looks like an open-air market and the table there is covered with

skulls and different animal parts for sale, where is that photo, and what's

going on there?

 

BROWN: That's on the northern border of Thailand and Burma, an area that's quite

infamous and that's the Golden Triangle. What that person's just selling bits

and pieces basically. Just trying to make a few bucks to buy some food, to pay

rent, do all the things that we all do.

 

YOUNG: What sort of things would be on sale there? What would you pick up there?

Not that you would.

 

BROWN: You could pick up anything. I found a rhino, a complete rhino horn which

is extremely rare to find a complete one and they wanted eight and a half

thousand U.S. which sounds a lot, but if I was a dealer by the time I got that

to Hong Kong or the Middle East or Singapore or something like that it would be

a hundred and twenty, a hundred and thirty thousand U.S. So it's serious money

at stake.

 

 

 

At Scotland Yard in England, four of its 44,000 employees are assigned to

curbing the wildlife trade. (Photo: © Patrick Brown/Panos)

 

 

YOUNG: How do you get access to take these pictures? How to get to where you

need to be to take these shots?

 

BROWN: When I first got involved in this project, I thought, okay, it's a very

subdued subject, it's a dark element of society, how am I going to get into

this? So I went to places like the Thai-Burma border and I would pull out my

camera and I would secretly try and take pictures and they were on to me

straight away, they knew exactly what I was doing. It wasn't the camera I

finally figured out, it was my body language. I knew that I was doing something

that they didn't want me to know that I was doing and I just kept getting

nowhere with it. Absolutely just banging my head against a brick wall so to

speak.

 

YOUNG: So what's the correct body language? How do you communicate that they can

relax? You just act like you're taking a snapshot of the picnic or something or

what?

 

BROWN: Basically. I went in there with, I thought, how can I disarm these

people? I thought, hang on, what I'll do is I'll show them all my tools. I'll

show them who I am, I'll show them my camera and I won't deny the fact that I'm

taking pictures. And I went in there with, and I sort of all guns blazing lights

flashing, quite a loud T-shirt. I dressed quite touristy-like and an old camera

around my neck and that was it, they were disarmed. And I would say, wow, really

we don't have this in Australia. We don't have bears like this and wow, you've

got bears' paws and then the guy would say, well you think that's really weird,

you should see what's in the back of the shop. And that's how I got into the

back of these places.

 

YOUNG: You know another image that really stands out in this spread in the

magazine, it's what I would call a perfectly normal looking office except

there's a severed tiger's head on the top of the desk and I take it this is an

office in Scotland Yard of some officer who's in the effort to intercept these

type of smuggled goods as they're making their way around the world. How good a

job do you think we're doing at that?

 

BROWN: As good a job as we're doing in the drug trade. (laughter)

 

YOUNG: Which I'm guessing is to say, not so good.

 

BROWN: Not so good at all. With the political climate at the moment, customs and

the authorities are looking for arms at the moment. Then it goes down to people,

then people contraband, and then from there it's animals. Animals are at the

bottom of the rung. The developed world does not consider them a serious threat

because they're not actually, it's not part of their constituency so we, I say

we, I say as a developed society, we don't take it seriously but meanwhile we

tell developing nations to take it seriously.

 

YOUNG: Well, do you intend to stick with this? I mean if part of your goal here

is to use your photography as a form of public education, doesn't exactly sound

like you're hopeful.

 

 

 

In the Thai/Burmese border towns of Moung La and Tachilek, markets display

everything from rhino horns to macaque skulls for tourists. (Photo: © Patrick

Brown/Panos)

 

 

BROWN: I'm an optimist at the end of the day. I'll cut to the chase, I am going

to stick with this, I think it's going to turn into a large portion of my work

for my life actually. It's actually going to be the animal trade in Asia. The

other element to that is the people who are interested in my work are pretty

much already the converted. They already know something about it. What my plan

is is actually to take these images and take them to places like Burma, take

them to Cambodia, to Laos, India, Nepal, actually take it to the places where

the poachers are and get the stories translated into the local language or the

local dialect. That is going to do more than somebody buying a book on a

bookshelf in New York.

 

YOUNG: Patrick Brown's photo essay on the illegal trade in Asian wildlife

appears in the July/August issue of Mother Jones magazine. Patrick thank you

very much for joining us today.

 

BROWN: Not a problem Jeff. Thank you very much.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Patrick Brown’s website

 

Mother Jones photo essay text

 

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