For three decades, photographer Guillaume Bonn has traversed East Africa, documenting how civilization’s quintuple threats of modernity, development, population growth, armed conflict, and climate change have imperiled the region’s wildlife, habitats, and human communities.
Some of his most distinctive pictures—originally shot on assignment for Vanity Fair—are those depicting camouflage-clad local rangers from game reserves, conservancies, and elsewhere, who risk their lives to combat criminal rings of poachers seeking the valuable horns and tusks of rhinos and elephants.
The result is an epic new book, Paradise Inc., published just in time for Earth Day. Herewith, VF showcases some of Bonn’s most arresting images, which, in the words of the Maasai elder and peace activist Ezekiel Ole Katato, convey the “profound struggle…between humanity and the untamed.” The photographs, often in jarring juxtaposition, underscore the cruel bargain of Western “progress”—and the paradoxical damage brought 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
