The Accidental Coca Lord

Chapter 17

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FILTHY RATS

When the lights go out on Broadway

There used to be a TGI Friday at the bottom of Broadway, but I never ate there. After closing, the kitchen staff would pile bin bags up on the pavement, out the back on Trinity Place. They’d be swollen with food waste, sometimes stretched open by their weight, some dripping grease. A few minutes after being set down and the doors bolted for the night, the rats would move in, scale the mountain of black plastic, their noses acutely tuned to the contents, and chew their way in. Soon the bags would be squirming, as a thirty-strong rodent army feasted inside, safe from predators and free to gorge themselves on burgers, steaks and whatever they fancied for dessert.

At around 4.30, an hour before the summer sky began to lighten, a garbage truck would swing in, a bunch of guys would jump out and the rats would scatter across the pavement as the bags were lifted and thrown into the crusher. They’d run along the edges of the kerbs where they wouldn’t be noticed, to a catch basin (or storm drain, as we call it in the UK). Here they’d drop down through an iron grille into the safety of the sewer below, gorged and safe, ready to groom, snooze and breed beneath the paving slabs as the first of the morning commuters strolled in blissful ignorance above them.

The animal kingdom has learned to keep its secrets from us, while I’ve spent a lifetime trying to reveal them. It makes you look at the world in a very different way. The New York I know is a city where one population exploits the cracks in the other. It’s a world of a million eyes, always watching from the shadows. If you know where to look you’ll see them – but its probably best you don’t.

I hate rats. They’re disgusting. Some people like to credit them with the virtues we should extend to all animals; they’re apparently smart, they’re clean, they care for each other. Well, that’s true for all sorts of otherwise unpleasant people. I don’t like looking at them, I don’t like working with them and the last one I was forced to hold, in an attempt to bond with its more agreeable virtues, pissed between my fingers while its massive nut sack dragged across my palms.

I used to enjoy spending evenings sitting with a beer in a beach chair in the chicken run with the kids shooting them, but that’s about as much enjoyment I’ve ever had from rats. Evolution has taught us to be repulsed by them – their wiry little whiskered faces, their pin-prick beady eyes and their filthy wormlike tail - and for good reason. Bubonic plague wiped out a third of the population of Europe – twice.

I ignored all the emails from Todd James when he asked me to shoot a story on rats. Todd was a picture editor at National Geographic and had been handed the story after writer Emma Marris had pitched it. Finally I got an irate phone call from Sarah Leen, the head of photography at the magazine.

‘I want you to shoot this story on rats for Todd,’ she barked at me.

‘I don’t want to, Sarah. I hate rats.’

‘Well, you have to,’ she said, before basically slamming the phone down.

I adored Sarah, but I was also terrified of her. She was busy, brutal and impatient. I was also under contract and so had no choice but to agree. I called Todd up and we spoke for a while. He told me a bit about the story and how excited he was by it, and he blew smoke up my ass by telling me there had been a big meeting and everyone had agreed that nobody could shoot the story better than me. Eventually he stroked my ego enough for me to comply. I subsequently found out that I was actually the second choice to shoot the article; my colleague Anand Varma had already turned it down.

I had been put under contract by the magazine, originally to shoot the Yellowstone story. US immigration required that I had an O-1 visa. Being an ‘Alien of extraordinary ability’ allowed me to work in the US, but only if I remained under contract. After Yellowstone I went on to shoot a series of other stories in the States, one on bird cognition and another on the sage brush sea, the dominating ecosystem of the American West. During this period I was also awarded a fellowship at the National Geographic Society and given the title ‘Innovation in Photography Fellow’. It was a great honour but a pretty pointless exercise. My job was to work with the engineering department to modernise our camera-trapping technology, while also inventing other photographic technologies. I’d been given the job due to the technical nature of my work, which developed during my years as a film maker. We never really achieved much, however, as the fellowship was a two-year position and the engineering department took two years to build a basic first prototype of our camera-trap design, which turned out to be a pile of shit anyway.

My commitment to the fellowship was 120 days a year, while my commitment to my magazine contract was another 120 days. When I signed those two contracts to run sequentially, I was so excited. I’d made it, beyond all my dreams. The reality of 240 days of contracted work a year for two years, however, was burnout.

I’d met George McKenzie Jr a couple of years earlier when he worked at a camera store in New York called Adorama and I was buying a new camera bag. I knew the one I wanted and he chatted to me while giving me the hard sell on it anyway. I was there with Bill Marr, the creative director of National Geographic, and when George found out we both worked for the magazine he practically fell to his knees in supplication. He was engaging and great fun, and we ended up keeping in touch on Facebook.

A few months later I had an assignment shooting images of pigeons on the rooftops of Brooklyn and I asked George if he wanted to assist me. He and I spent a week wandering the streets of Brooklyn, looking up, trying to find where the pigeon lofts were, then shouting up to the guys on the roof and persuading them to let us come up and to photograph them. It was a fascinating assignment, and I loved my time drinking beer and smoking joints on the rooftops, photographing the guys like an MTV video, lit with a big studio light and a beauty dish – big tattooed guys, fronting hard, flexed muscles, doting over their precious pigeons. I doubt I’d have ever had the access they afforded us if I hadn’t had George with me. He was charming and convincing, able to talk on a level that I couldn’t even understand. The pigeon guys were Hispanic and African American, I was a posh white guy from England, George was a big black guy with Guyanese roots but Brooklyn through and through.

George and I met Bobby Corrigan one afternoon in the spring of 2018 in a café in Lower Manhattan. Bobby was the rat man of New York. He knew everything there was to know about the disgusting little fuckers, and he spoke with such animation and infectious enthusiasm that soon I couldn’t wait to roll my sleeves up and start shooting (while obviously trying to avoid getting salmonella and Weil’s disease and toxoplasmosis). Bobby was small, bespectacled and blessed with a New York accent so perfect that it sounded like he was putting it on. After giving us a general overview of New York’s rats, he walked us through Chinatown, showing us how and where the rats lived and impressing on us the cost of them living as they did in the city – which was apparently tens of millions of dollars per year. Most striking were the sunken kerbs on almost every street corner. I wouldn’t have taken a second glance at them until Bobby explained that they were broken because they’d been undermined by rats. The pavements featured all sorts of invisible instructions that we couldn’t see; we just needed Bobby to point them out. Along the inside edges where the shopfronts ran, we saw dark grey lines, grease – or sebum, as Bobby called it – excreted from the rats’ belly fur. This stained their scuttle routes, providing subtle maps to the trained eye. We’d stop at certain spots and smell their urine, which had an intensity and sharpness all of its own. Once we had it in our noses it triggered the instant we caught it, quite overpowering the stench of trash and dog piss that defines New York.

Bobby showed us rats openly feeding on grain thrown for the pigeons in Columbus Park. ‘Yeah, they come out in the day here,’ he said. ‘They’re pretty safe and they’ve got a good food supply.’

We watched a little kid feeding a couple with bread from a bag with as much as enthusiasm as she gave the pigeons, who flew out of the way of the dominant rats. ‘They sometimes catch and eat the pigeons. They’ll leap on their backs and grab them like a leopard in the Serengeti,’ he explained in his well-rehearsed patter.

As we headed south, Bobby read the pavement like a tracker in the African bush, pointing out holes in walls and drains where the rats hid. He then took us down into the subway at Rector Street. We jumped the ticket barrier and walked along the edge of the platform to the end, following his finger as he described how the sebum lines revealed the rats’ behaviour. The sebum had marked the ground behind the steel uprights that struck up from the middle of the platform to support the ceiling.

‘When the train arrives at the station and everyone gets out, you can see here, the rats hide behind the upright, then when everyone has gone, they come back out.’ It surprised me how bold they must be to just hunker down behind a post while people walk right past, totally oblivious. The more he pointed out holes in the steel structure and how the rats could exploit them, the more I realised that in this city of two very distinct populations the rats had learned to become almost invisible, while at the same time being ever-present and always close.

Lower Manhattan was blessed with more rats than anywhere else in New York. It was apparently a perfect environment for them, its higgledy-piggledy layout, old buildings and decrepit infrastructure providing safe spaces for them to sleep and breed, while their dietary requirements were more than catered for by its numerous restaurants, delis and bodegas, all of which were bound to an antiquated and inadequate trash removal system. The more Bobby explained, the more he revealed that the place was perfectly designed for rats. They had flourished here since they first stepped of a boat from Europe, probably in Seaport in around 1750. Manhattan rats were, in fact, so prolific that there were now three genetically distinct populations – Lower, Midtown and Upper Manhattan rats – and there was almost no crossover between them, Midtown being so clean and so much better structured that it acted as a genetic buffer.

As we walked back up from the subway into the early evening rush hour, Bobby became excited by a classic Tom and Jerry-looking hole at the base of a plywood wall that masked a construction site on the other side of the road from the station entrance.

‘See those trash bags,’ he said, pointing to a pile propped up next to an overflowing rubbish bin perhaps two yards from the hole in the board. It was the waste of the bodega, whose doorway we loitered in. ‘I bet you if you stand quietly here and watch that hole, you’ll see a rat by half past six this evening.’

He went on to explain that rats love construction sites, almost as much as they love storm drains, as they can dig holes and make nests in the exposed soil and sand. If there’s a nearby food supply then all the better. We’d find rats. It was apparently that simple. Bobby shook our hands warmly but he seemed slightly rushed – his passion had got the better of him and he was running late. He headed off back to work –consulting, as always, with city and government officials on a problem that was growing every year and had no obvious solution.

At 6.29 precisely a rat’s head appeared from the hole. It watched nervously for pedestrians while George and I stood stock-still and quiet, pressing ourselves tight against the wall of the bodega. When it saw that all was clear, it shot across the pavement and vanished into the pile of bin bags. A few weeks later we shot the opening double-page spread at that exact spot.

But before that, we had learn how to shoot photos of rats.

George and I soon slotted into a routine. He’d travel up from Brooklyn in the evening to meet me at my hotel and we’d head out at dusk to walk the streets looking for rats. When we found construction sites we’d hang around to see if any rats appeared and, if they did, work out where they were heading. We’d look for possible shots, and if the site looked promising we’d return over several nights to gauge activity. We kept a basic camera set up in a backpack, and occasionally we’d find a really active spot and try to shoot some images. At first they’d look shit, but the more we practised, the more we refined our tactics and techniques. We became familiar with the habits of the rats and learned what was possible with the camera and lights. I was keen to shoot low and wide – to be at rat level, with their streets behind them. It meant placing my camera on the ground, framing up a shot and then triggering it remotely from a few yards away so as not to disturb the rats.

We found a very active colony living under a large metal grille that surrounded the roots of a small tree just outside the Andaz Hotel on Wall Street. The hotel’s restaurant dumped its bin bags about a metre from the tree, so the rats had an almost perfect existence, emerging from under the pavement, through the metal grille and straight into piles of food waste. We spent a few nights working with them, positioning the camera so close that they’d sometimes sniff the lens. They got used to the flashguns going off and the sound of the shutter as it fired, which meant that we could work the lighting and exposure constantly until we were making really nice-quality images of the rats scuttling about on the metal grille, back and forth to the bin bags, with the street behind. At one point an NYPD car pulled up perfectly in the background, the cop sitting inside and smoking his vape. I frantically worked to grab as many shots of rats scuttling back and forth as I could in the brief time the patrol car stuck around. To have a street scene of rats on the job in New York with the addition of a Big Apple cliché took the imagery up a notch.

The more we worked with the rats, the tamer they became. Until one night, while fiddling with the flash in the tree above their metal grille home, one popped out and onto my shoe, where it sat briefly to look at me. We’d have carried on working the spot had I stupidly not posted one of the images on my Instagram feed. The following night, when we arrived to start shooting, the bin bags had been replaced with wheelie bins (or dumpsters as the Yanks call them).

The rats would usually be done by the first light of dawn, so we’d shoot until around six or seven, by which point we’d smoked a ton of sativa, drunk a few beers and were shivering in our puffers. We’d then stagger to a diner, slump at a table, quaff bad drip coffee and shovel down sloppy eggs and bacon, before heading off and collapsing into bed around eight or nine. As the shots progressed and became more complicated, however, we began to get less sleep as we needed to buy bits of equipment to adapt. So we’d usually go over to B&H, New York’s biggest camera store, in the afternoons, where we’d buy remote triggers, wires or slave units. This would always take ages as we struggled to get cabs to stop for us, until we figured that if I put my hand out instead of George, they’d stop straight away.

‘The Indians won’t stop for me because I’m black,’ George explained one afternoon as we watched another pass by. The driver even made eye contact and shook his head. It shocked me. Back at my hotel room we’d sit on the bed and take everything apart, rewiring and soldering all the bits until we had a system specifically designed for whatever shot we had in mind for the evening.

The shot outside TGI Friday on Broadway was by far the most complicated and hardest-won. The rats that raided the bin bags lived in a storm drain under the edge of the kerb among the cobbles at the bottom of Exchange Alley where it joined Trinity Place. We’d found it one night after following the rats the fifteen or so yards back from the writhing bin bags; when we peered down through the iron grille that covered the storm drain we’d seen a seething mass of rats, perhaps forty of them. It was an image I couldn’t get out of my head; more like something out of a James Herbert novel than anything I could have imagined in reality. I immediately knew that I had to get a camera down inside to shoot the swarm. We tried to lift the grille but it was stuck firm, so we realised that the only way we could pull the shot off would be to find a camera thin enough to fit through it. George and I measured the width of the gaps – at their widest point they were only 42mm.

The following day we went to the camera store to find a suitable camera. There were a few of the right dimensions but they were all point-and-shoot models, none of which had the pro specs we needed. Eventually we found one that could do everything necessary. It had a small built-in flash, an interface that would allow me to fire it remotely, an HDMI output that would allow me to put a video feed on it and it could shoot in RAW format. But we’d be taking a big risk – it was 43mm wide. That night, after a lot of wiring back in my hotel room, we managed to force a brand new $700 Sony camera through a gap a millimetre smaller than its width.

Despite basically destroying the screen on the back of the camera and scraping off the paintwork on the front, the system we’d rigged worked. The HDMI cable that plugged into the side of the camera gave me a live view inside the drain, which meant we could accurately compose the shot and see when the rats looked good in frame. When they did, I could snap a shot using a remote release. When the camera took a photo its small flash fired, instantly triggering a large studio flash that I wired to it via an optical slave unit – a small sensor that fires a flash when it sees the light of another. The studio light looked down into the drain from above and lit the rats through the metal grille. The resulting image, of thirteen rats tightly packed among the filth and dirt, was dark and intimate and told a story. The studio light above cast the shadows of the grille slats right across the frame, revealing where the rats were hiding – right beneath the pavement where the feet of commuters passed by in ignorance of this other world.

George and I spent six weeks in New York. We continued to discover good spots to work in, mainly around the World Trade Center. We found one in Tribeca that was overrun with rats, just next to a construction site. The rats raided a rubbish bin near a deli, where people would chuck half-eaten pizzas and the rats would scale the wire-mesh side of the bin to drag slices out. The spot was so productive and the rats so tame that we could keep fiddling with the lighting to perfect it, casting it down on the rats from above to make them look like they were lit by a streetlight, while adding a little slither of backlight to lift their form off the background. The spot was annoyingly close to a tramp, who seemed to be permanently wanking in his sleeping bag. But he got used to us and we got used to him in the end. If families walked by, George would rush out to usher them around him, politely explaining, ‘There’s a bum rubbing one out there, might be best to go round.’

We went into the Cherry Street projects at night, which I’d never have done without George. We spoke to the corner boys about rats and they got all excited, as everyone seemed to about their wild neighbours, and they pointed us to good spots where the rubbish bins were overflowing. We’d try an hour or so of shooting in each spot, but I’d usually set up and then decide I didn’t like the framing or the lighting and make us move on. I’m very indecisive when I shoot. If we saw garbage trucks, George would run over and flag them down, talking to the binmen in a language I could barely understand, to find out where the most active rat spots were. He’d also get their numbers so he could bother them with questions on nights when we were struggling for locations. They all loved him and would phone if they ever encountered an active spot. People would always stop and talk to us as we worked; we must have looked interesting, loitering as we did with loads of equipment on the pavement at four in the morning. Most people would tell us their rat stories and almost all exaggerate the size of the creatures they’d seen. ‘The size of cats’ seemed to be a common phrase. It was nonsense, of course, but probably not in their minds. The largest rat Bobby ever saw was one pound eight ounces.

To expand the coverage we spent time with Mikey the rat catcher. He was keen to show us his work, and spoke of a business that dealt with a problem that would never be solved, which was of course a great line of work to be in. He’d grown up in Bensonhurst in Brooklyn among the kids of the mafia, and he spoke as one of them; when we ate lunch in restaurants he was extended the respect his accent, demeanour and tattoos commanded. But Mikey wasn’t one of them; he was a good guy. He took us on tours through the suburbs of Brooklyn where he dealt with infestations in the dungeons below housing blocks and in back alleys. Here rats swarmed into shops and houses from their nests among the flotsam of abandoned gardens. He’d lay traps in ceiling spaces, and told us how some rats were so smart that they knew to avoid them; but he knew those rats too and would be after particular individuals who’d eluded him. We’d go into restaurants, climb ladders and fill poison-bait boxes through tiles in the vents and ducts. (We avoided certain restaurants for lunch after he told us what he’d seen in their kitchens.)

Traditional poisons apparently didn’t work anymore as the rats had evolved immunity to them. Some rats were smart enough to realise the effects of the poisons that did work and stopped eating before the dose became large enough to be fatal. Mothers would even apparently prevent their young eating the poisons. Mikey had, as a result, starting using anticoagulants instead. These blood thinners acted long after the rats ate the poison, which broke the connection to the bait, but they meant the rats suffered a protracted and painful death. I photographed Mikey as he worked, and after a successful job I’d snap him loading the corpses of rats into bags in the back of his pick-up, which he always did with a smile. In a park on the Upper East Side I shot Mikey pouring steaming dry ice down rat burrows in the flower beds. The rats would apparently be sent to sleep and died in peace, sent to heaven by the soothing effect of CO₂ inhalation.

Like so many of the people I meet and work with, Mikey and I became friends and we’d have beers together after work, when George and I would piss ourselves laughing at his stories.

One afternoon he called me up. ‘Hey, you want to go get sushi tonight with two chicks from outta town?’

‘Sounds great, but I’m on nightshift with George so can’t stay late,’ I replied.

‘OK. Meet me at Nobu at seven.’

I figured I could fit a quick dinner in before going to work, if I didn’t drink much. I’m hopeless after one drink and certainly wouldn’t be able to work after any more. By ten o’clock, when the bill came in, I was so wasted on sake that I offered to split it with Mikey. He and I and the two chicks from outta town had tried pretty much every dish on the menu. With service included the bill came to $1,000. Despite my enthusiasm to reach for my credit card, I was so pissed off. I didn’t show up for work that night.

As the images developed technically, so did their style. I often set out on a project with a particular style in mind, and that changes as the story progresses. I never want the style to be a gimmick; instead it should convey something emotionally about the story. With rats, I wanted to show the reader what a rat looks like to the average New Yorker – a creature scuttling across the pavement in the shadows of the darkness. We searched everywhere for a suitable spot but eventually ended back where Bobby had left us – outside Rector Street subway.

The scene was perfect: every few minutes the rats would scuttle from the hole in the plywood across to the bin bags. Behind them, the subway station entrance and a long-distance street scene, claustrophobically walled in by skyscrapers. A traffic light threw alternating green and red light onto the pavement, which I then added to by taping two flashguns to it. One was covered with red gel, which cast an even more intense red light across the scene. The other flash I didn’t filter and left white, but put a snoot around it – a tight cone that focused the light down to a small pool. As the rats always ran the same route from the hole to the bin bags, I was able to adjust the flashguns so accurately that if I fired the shot at exactly the right moment, the rat would be captured as a silhouette against a pool of white light that sat like a bullseye in a larger pool of red light.

It took a long time to fire the camera at precisely the right moment to get the perfect silhouette of the rat scuttling across the pavement, but when I finally did it looked fantastic. It was New York at night, exactly the view that millions of the city’s residents would see as they either leapt out the way screaming or just carried on as usual because they were so used to it. The rat was small in frame – its black form slightly off-centre in the bullseye of colour that I’d blasted across the pavement – and it was dashing towards a rubbish bin whose near edge was lit red by the same flash. Behind, the street scene was bathed in orange from the glow of the sodium vapour streetlights, the windows of distant skyscrapers glowing off into the background. And serendipity had stepped in to help too, the blur of a yellow cab dashing across the intersection behind the subway entrance placing the image firmly on the streets of New York.

In Washington, DC, which apparently has more rats per capita than New York, George and I covered rat catchers working the streets of the Adams Morgan neighbourhood with Patterdale terriers. Although traps and poisons had a reasonable amount of success at keeping rat populations under control, hunting with terriers was much more effective. Behind the cacophony of Saturday-night bars and restaurants, the back alleys were crawling with rats. After a briefing with dog boss Scott Mullaney, a disparate team of excited crew and volunteers moved in to turn over rotting furniture and old bits of carpet. They were all armed with ice hockey paddles that they’d use to corral the terrified, exposed rats into the jaws of the waiting terriers, who would grab them and violently rattle them to death. When Scott shouted at them to ‘drop’, they moved on to the next rat.

It was a highspeed shitshow, with rats leaping from every corner and the dogs squealing and biting at them with all the exuberant excitement and efficiency they’d been bred for. Within ten minutes of starting they’d dispatched twenty rats; within the hour the massacre had hit seventy. As we swept down the alleyway, the dogs would be lifted and dropped into the large wheelie bins. These would explode with rats trying to escape, while the dogs inside whirled around savaging them. It was difficult to photograph – I had to run to keep up with the dogs, then get my camera in their faces as they fought and ripped at the corpses – but enormously exciting, the images displaying the contradiction of vibrant life and grim death.

In Geneva I photographed lab rats at the university. Rats had become one of the most successful creatures on the planet by exploiting humans, so I wanted to show how we in turn exploited them. The study I chose to shoot involved white lab rats who’d had their spines broken, paralysing them below the waist. They’d then had a sensor wired between their brains and the spine below the break, to see if they could bypass the break and learn to walk. The study, which was obviously being done in order to attempt it on humans if successful, was showing some promise. After spending ages lighting the scene (I’m terrible at studio lighting), I shot a rather disturbing image of a rat with a wire sticking directly out of its brain and held in a supporting backpack above a complex Meccano-looking machine arrayed with more wires, enabling it to walk on a green felt treadmill. The blue-gloved hand of the researcher reaches out to encourage it forward.

In Prague I photographed Sedlec Ossuary, a bone church. In around 1511 a half-blind monk was given the task of decorating the church with the exhumed skeletons of between 40,000 and 70,000 plague victims. The result was an extraordinary example of macabre Gothic indulgence. Every inch of the ossuary’s interior dripped with carefully arranged patterns of bones and skulls, among which hung sumptuous oil paintings of religious scenes and numerous carved fat cherubs clutching trumpets, candles or their cocks. While some of it appeared to be arranged to respect the dead, other elements definitely appeared more comical, as if the half-blind monk, up to his nuts in bones, got bored and started to take the piss. I, of course, panicked my way through the shoot as I always do. I only had a couple of hours among the throng of tourists to make a frame that worked, but eventually left with something nice. I spent the rest of the weekend enjoying walking around Prague with my mum, whom I’d taken along for her birthday. We ate some pleasant food and I listened to her complaining that the old town, with its tenth-century buildings, wasn’t old enough.

I finally wrapped the coverage in Rajasthan, at the Karni Mata Temple (or the ‘Rat Temple’, as it’s more commonly known). I’d naturally done my research, googling every picture of it before getting on the plane. It looked innocuous enough from the outside, with its white marble stone walls and its classically over-ornate, garishly pink façade scrubbed immaculately clean. As I walked through the impressive rampart archway to enter the inner courtyard I saw the first few rats, small and black, scuttle between the lines of colourfully dressed worshippers.

But when I turned right towards a crowd to see what they were looking at I at last appreciated the true nature of the place. The floor writhed – black and moving – and the walls squirmed. Every step, every structure, every single surface was covered in rats. The metal grilles that kept the tourists at bay were simply dripping with the rodents and at their feet the rats gathered thick, waiting to be fed. As I walked deeper into the temple the smell became overwhelming and my feet were soon soaking. I’d had to remove my shoes before entering, and my socks were now saturated with the piss of 25,000 black rats.

The rats of Karni Mata are holy, of course, considered to be the reincarnated boys and men of Karni Mata, gifted life after death by Yama, the god of life. To touch a rat or eat food that has been nibbled by one is a great honour for the worshippers who travel here from all over India. Twice daily the rats are fed huge bowls of milk, from which they politely sip in a large, ordered ring, and huge piles of chopped fruit and veg are scattered for them, along with bags of food that the tourists and visitors throw from paper bags. As a result the rats are completely tame.

I found photographing them quite tricky. My assistant, fellow National Geographic photographer Prazanjeet Yadav, and I worked to try and capture the story in a single shot, but it proved difficult. The rats were so small in comparison to the thronging people, and finding frames that made them stand out sufficiently was tricky. Like pretty much everything I shoot, the background was as important as the foreground; it’s the context that builds the story in the image, but it mustn’t overpower the subject, which has to remain immediately readable. So, like in New York, I shot wide and low, very close to the rats, in an attempt to see the world from their perspective. It meant getting my knees constantly soaked in piss as I waddled around trying to stick my camera in their faces, with Prazanjeet holding a flash off at an angle to add a lick of light to them and lift their forms off the background.

It worked in a limited way. We got one very nice shot of two rats fighting while others watched on, although they looked more like they were standing up and dancing together. The textures of brown – from the rats and the marble wall in the foreground to the temple structure in the background – all matched, giving an image that looked more like an oil painting than a grabbed frame. The final image that we ran in the magazine was of a few of the guys who worked in the temple cutting veg into a huge bowl. A guy lies sleeping in the background, while rats sit around eating. At the base of the frame three rats are piled onto a female rat, fucking her. It kind of said it all.

When the story came out the following year it was a huge success. It seemed that people, regardless of whether they liked rats or hated them, were universally fascinated by them. I was given the nickname ‘Rat Man’ at National Geographic, which I of course hated, but I tolerated it with a wry grin. It’s finally worn off now and I’m back to being the ‘Otter Guy’, which I’m far more comfortable with.

Even my own kids indulged the new connection. For my birthday that year my middle son Gus, then thirteen, drew me a nice picture of a rat – dead in a large rat trap next to a bit of cheese – being fucked from behind by another rat with a huge smile on its face. I was so proud. But his drawing was an accurate description of such a fecund creature. After all, take one year, and one pair of rats – after ten weeks they’d have had nine pups, by week thirty all of these will have bred and there are now 270. By the year end, without any predators, diseases or Mikeys to deal with them, there would be 11,907 more of the little fuckers scuttling around the streets of New York.

In the next instalment I head to Mozambique and find a new Eden.