The Giraffe In Red Sneakers

How? And more importantly, why?

I’ve been saving this image for a while. It sits in the favourites album on my phone; always there so I can find it quickly, to show people when the subject of putting red shoes on a giraffe comes up. I pretend to smirk when I reveal it; all part of a well rehearsed routine to gauge their reaction. People seem either immediately shocked or weirdly bemused. Nobody thinks it’s real. I watch as they turn to me, wondering what sort of asshole would ‘happy slap’ a corpse in Photoshop. When I tell them that I actually did buy two pairs of knock-off red Nikes and fit them to the giraffe’s enormous hooves; they become confused; but their reaction is the point of the photo. Then, when they hear the title, it all suddenly makes sense, because until then, they’re asking why? Why is the giraffe wearing red shoes?

The ‘how?’ is easy. I put them on it. Granted they didn’t fit very well and it took some stretching and fiddling to do it. And I didn’t particularly enjoy doing it as I feared the giraffe may have died of Anthrax (usually a result of an exhausted immune system) but just hoped it hadn’t. The ‘why?’ is the deeper question.

Without the shoes, the image was powerful. The eerie shadow of the giraffe’s head scorched into the earth by a tendon that had tightened in the sun and dragged the neck back. The featureless pallets of browns and white bone, gave it a simplicity and honesty of form that was persuasive, despite it being wretched. Like so many of the corpses I had seen on that two-week trip to document the drought, its last steps were most likely in search of food, not water. I shot various versions of it with my drone, in differing light conditions. People were shocked by it; a powerful poster child of East Africa’s seemingly endless drought; the longest in living memory. But the image only told half a story.

I stared at the giraffe, dead in the dirt, for a long time after I had taken it, trying to figure out what was missing. I knew the message but I couldn’t figure out the medium. Inspiration rarely comes from staring at images on computer screens; I find it comes on the off beat, when my brain is elsewhere. So I gave it some space and waited. A few days later, while half asleep in my tent it came to me - bright red trainers. So obtuse that they would bash the dull palette, but more importantly, they’d give the image its truth.

The drought that killed the giraffe could be attributed to a bunch of factors - the climate crisis, global warming, natural climate fluctuations, over grazing, water extraction. The validity of their balance however, can only ever be reduced to opinion. People argue over environmental issues, depending on where their understandings fall, steered occasionally by science, but I suspect more often by politics and ego. We’re all guilty of it; I know I am. But the argument of what is to blame (and all of those things probably are) is irrelevant; because ultimately it all boils down to one thing - too many people, demanding too much of the planet. The giraffe died of ‘consumption’.

Africa is increasingly becoming the depository of western failings. We’ve put it in an impossible position, where we measure it against western culture and society, rather than giving it the cultural agency we afford just about everywhere else. We romanticise its wildlife so much that it is perhaps the only continent on earth, where animal life is valued above human life. We chide it for doing everything we have already done in the west (and the east for that matter) - exploding populations, habitat loss, biodiversity loss; and then through our extraordinary ability to consume, position it at the coal face of the climate crisis. That’s why the red shoes - they are all of the above, all our failings.

‘The World’s Going to End, But You Can Buy Cool Stuff’- the image and the title, is powerful for all the wrong reasons. I believe it is beautiful, it is funny, it is dark, but most horrifically, it is true.

The image I am going to post next week is more powerful and more disturbing. I shall release it here first.