Photographer Tim Flach’s latest book Endangered, with text by zoologist Jonathan Baillie, offers a powerful visual record of threatened animals and ecosystems facing the harshest of challenges
Tim Flach sees his Hasselblad H4D-60 camera as a means to its end: capturing the character and emotions of an animal. Until now his interest has been in the way humans shape animals, but in his new book, Endangered, he poses the question of what these animals, and their potential disappearance, mean to us.
Twenty months of shooting and six months of assembling has resulted in a collection of more than 180 pictures. "In some cases we put up a black background in a zoo or a natural reserve, in others it meant being underwater with hippos or great white sharks."
On his homepage, Flach namechecks his photographic idols like Irving Penn or Guy Bourdin but also Picasso. Understanding the picture and its protagonists seem more important to him than the technical circumstances that led to the picture.
The photographs cover diverse themes around the topic of threatened ecosystems and species. Among the latter are well-known ones like the extinct passenger pigeon, rediscovered species like the Lord Howe Island stick insect, or the last of their kind, like the northern white rhinoceros.
"I wanted an array of endangered species which represented various aspects, some better and some lesser known," Flach says. "I went to pursue the rare Saiga antelope and visited their habitat by the Caspian Sea during the summer, waiting in a hideout close to where they go to drink. But then I realised the weather conditions were so extreme that the heat had distorted the pictures. So we went back in the winter when it was -30C and I was lying down on the ground in camouflage for three days using the longest possible lens, and finally got the shot."
Saiga antelopes cannot be maintained in zoos because their bones are so light that they would crash in a transport container. Locals persecute them for their horns and hunt them down on mopeds. "Often the less exciting images have the most interesting backstories."
By including pictures of landscapes, Flach also tries to paint the whole picture of how we deal with nature: "I see linking the animals back to their habitat as the most important objective. The habitat is something that is essential to the conservation of endangered animals.
"The most important message is that it's not simply images of animals but that every aspect of our being is influenced by the natural world around us. With over seven hours a day that we spend on the internet, it becomes clear that we don't have the same sensibilities that our predecessors had to their environment. I want to point to the ecological drivers of humanity through portrayals of animals and I chose some candidates to demonstrate that.
"Insects might not interest everyone but they are essential for sustaining life. As soon as their numbers are diminishing, many things are not controlled anymore."
As we don't know when the tipping points of a system could occur, we need to appreciate things before they are gone, he says. "For our own wellbeing we have to reconnect with the wild."