Swiss-born Genesis Award-winning wildlife photographer Karl Ammann
began his career by snapping African cheetahs, then great apes. His
admiration for the latter — and his horror at how many are
slaughtered and sold for food — inspired Ammann to join
forces with celebrated conservation writer Dale Peterson.
Berkeley-based UC Press published their harrowing 2003 book Eating
Apes as well as their latest collaboration, Elephant
Reflections, which is hands down one of this year’s most moving and
beautiful volumes. Ammann’s bold photographs of African elephants in
the wild — tusks, trunks, tails, and those all-knowing eyes
— accompany Peterson’s impassioned, eloquent text about this
“creature who quietly mocks our puny size and frantic chatter … and
who should, indeed, caution us, tell us to be careful, keep still, have
respect.” For zoophiles and conservationists it’s a hefty, handsome
coffee-table confection, but it’s also much more than that. Ammann’s
pictures serve as what-we-might-lose elegies alongside Peterson’s
revelations about poaching and politics: Smoked elephant meat is a key
part of the Central African Republic’s economy, for instance;
Zimbabwe’s government regularly slaughters hundreds of elephants for
feasts — and exchanges planeloads of ivory for Chinese guns
and ammunition.
.Best Animal Lover’s Call to (Ideological) Arms
Elephant Reflections by Karl Ammann and Dale Peterson