Love Lived here

International award-winning photographer Margot Raggett has published a series of sevenbooks in the Remembering Wildlife series featuring unusual wildlife images from photographers around the world. She has raised a significant financial sum for conservation, of close to R20 million. You can see the full series in the print edition of The Big Issue magazine.

WORDS: MARGOT RAGGETT IMAGES: COURTESY REMEMBERING WILDLIFE

The idea about publishing books started to form in 2014. I had the unfortunate experience in Kenya of seeing up close an elephant that had been killed with a poisoned arrow for its ivory. He had apparently escaped the poachers and run many miles before succumbing to the poison, so his little tusks were still there (it was a young bull, only about 12 to 14 years, we estimated, at an age when he’d likely only recently left his family). I was impotent with rage at the loss of life and futility of humans coveting ivory. Those feelings of rage would not leave me, and so I started to think about how I might channel them into something productive like an exhibition or book to raise awareness. At the time I’d been working as a photographer in residence at a camp in the Maasai Mara, so I had met a lot of local photographers working in the area. I decided to ask them each to donate an image to a collective book, which would be far more powerful than any one of us doing it individually. The idea was to make the most beautiful publication on the species ever seen, then sell it to spread awareness about poaching and raise funds to support those trying to protect elephants. As soon as I started approaching photographers with the idea, everyone said they’d love to be part of it, and soon photographers were approaching me, offering their work. It was deeply moving.

When Remembering Elephants was published in September 2016, it sold out within two months, and everyone started asking what would come next. At that point I was about to head out to Laikipia County in Kenya, to spend time with the last male northern white rhino known as Sudan, who was still alive at that point. I got to sit with him and contemplate that we humans had also brought his subspecies to the brink of extinction. I had the same overwhelming feelings of rage I’d had with the poached elephant, and I decided there and then there’d be another book, one that would be Remembering Rhinos. And so, the series began.