In Our Wake

Most of what I photograph is about beauty. This series is about what that beauty is up against. Wild animals live closer to us every year. Some of that closeness is old, worn into forest tracks and village edges, and it still almost works. But we don’t only live beside them. We drive in to look, we crowd around with our cameras, mine included, and we rarely think about what our being there costs them. And we leave things behind, sometimes even living things. Then there’s the land itself. Wild places keep shrinking, and more and more animals live outside them, on ground no one thinks of as theirs. The wolf at the end of this series is one of them. Like most of India’s wolves, it lives outside any protected area, on grassland written off as wasteland, and it’s running out of room. Most of it isn’t cruelty. We simply don’t notice. I became a wildlife photographer because of what I see these animals go through. I don’t want these pictures to shock anyone. I just want you to notice, the way I do. I photograph their beauty. I also owe them a voice.