Scrolling To Indifference

Let's keep ignoring the elephant in the room.....

“Everyday, I think about dying. About disease, starvation, violence, terrorism, war, the end of the world. It helps keep my mind off things.” - Roger McGough

Releasing this image scares the shit out of me. It is very, very wrong. It felt wrong taking it; it feels wrong looking at it and it feels wrong posting it. But that’s why I took it, because I think all the wrongs probably make a right.

It’s real; Martha really did lie down on that ivory blanket, next to the corpse of a dead female elephant, known locally as Malawi; in that stunning blue Julia Clancey kaftan, gold turban and Freya Rose platforms. We really did clear all the hyena shit from around the edges and rake the sand to make it look like a beach. I feel bad saying that the smell was unbearable, because it would rob Malawi of what little dignity she has left, but doesn’t the photo do that? I don’t know; it’s kind of too hot to handle. It presents a moral conundrum too complex to distil. I’m sure some people looking at it will be outraged and some will love it; but I hope, nobody will be able to ignore it.

Everything about this image has been carefully designed to be obtuse. If it is art, then it’s student art; you know, the sort of shit students come up with when they’re trying to think of the most outrageous thing they can, to stand out. It’s very deliberately that. I came up with it in Kenya, just after I’d shot the picture of the giraffe in red sneakers. I needed a ‘baseball bat around the face’ image to arrest the viewer from their phones and this was it.

But the seed for it was planted years ago. My friend and colleague Ami Vitale’s extraordinary photo of Sudan, the last male northern white rhino, being stroked by Joseph Wachira, one of his keepers, moments before he died; was not just emotionally powerful but it represented the end of a species. I scrolled past it one morning, while sitting on the toilet. It was breaking news. I registered it briefly but my thumb kept on going and I allowed my brain to follow.

It took a moment to realise what I had done. Hijacked by my phone - my morals, my integrity, my attention span, my inquisitiveness. Doom-scrolling has become an addictive pastime and it’s numbed us. It wasn’t that I didn’t care, it was just easier to ignore it and move on to the next thing that would grab my attention for a split second.

Posting photos on Instagram and other social media, may do more harm than it does good, precisely for the ‘feed fatigue’ I’ve detailed above. We call it ‘raising awareness,’a term whose results are unquantifiable. Cumulatively, I’m sure it does some good but it also tends to present a problem without a solution. It’s no wonder we just scroll on by. Raising awareness is all about the message. How we package that message and disseminate it does have a value and that needs careful consideration; because if I, a conservation photojournalist, am happy to scroll past news of the extinction of a species, then we’ve seriously fucked up the messaging - we have ‘scrolled to indifference’

This image is not about an elephant that died in the worst drought in living memory, it is an image about how we consume that information. It is therefore designed beyond the conundrum it presents. It mimics our phone screen - we have a moment of horror when we first see it, which we then quickly displace, as our eyes are drawn to Martha in all her beauty and splendour. They may flit back to Malawi, but Martha steals the show; she’s easier on the eye, less painful to consider, easier to wonder about. And that dress! It’s extraordinary, who was the designer? Oh and those shoes...

Here are some behind the scenes clips of the shoot in Kenya. The final image was taken with the help of Pauline Kyalo, Martha Sitwell, Peter Litus, Aidan Woodward and many other generous and trusting people, who may or may not want their names mentioned. #endtimes