Before Ever After: Photographs from Kenya and Tanzania

With the planet at a crossroads, I returned to East Africa to catch a glimpse into one of the earth’s last wild places; a tiny area of prehistory that still connects us to a time before modern man took over.  

As a landscape photographer, I search out extraordinary aspects of a place, open myself up to the reality of a scene and translate that into an image. In many ways, I am a guide – sharing those experiences so people know these places exist and are important. The beauty I found here was almost indescribable – visceral, fluid and raw. It stops you dead in your tracks and humbles you. Knowing this could all disappear in one’s lifetime, is heart-breaking.

My hope is that my photographs will serve to build bridges of empathy to these sensitive landscapes and ecosystems. We need these wild places as much as the animals of which call it home, for wilderness is the fabric of our universe.  Humans are biological creatures just as they are, breathing the same air, drinking the same water and walking on the same earth. We are not separate from the landscape – as they are not – and so to save these places is also about saving us.

My project Before Ever After was less about documenting the dwindling species than it was an effort re-present them in a distinctly contemporary way, as a reminder that such animals are not mythical beats, but earthly proprietors whose human tenants are both their greatest danger and only hope. In the series, which comprises images taken in Tanzania and Kenya, I see the African plane as a geographical equalizer, and not just between non-human species: lions rest in a sliver of shade, giraffes stand in formation as though posing for a family portrait, two elephants—a mother and her calf—walk across my frame. Animals are beings as deserving of the protections we expect ourselves”

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