Vultures - Photographing the Antiheroes of Our Ecosystems | Exposure

They are disgustingly ugly. They are the ultimate anti-hero, and something about that draws me to them in some sort of weird, morbid fascination. Actually, as I got to know them, and started researching them, and started to understand them more, I discovered that they are, of all the animals in the world, the ones that are possibly in the most trouble.

You get this sort of frenzied moment with vultures when they start feeding. What I wanted to do was actually get into the carcass and see them interact with each other inside a car. Because the vultures, they’re too smart. They didn't. They could see my camera. Then I discovered, okay, if I get it right inside the carcass, they didn't really notice the camera anymore. The image we got from it took three weeks, and we only really got one out of probably fifty thousand.

We look at vultures with a whole set of preconceptions. What I had to do is think of ways of presenting vultures to the world. They’re the fastest declining birds in history. They’re the fastest declining family of species in the world at the moment. Africa is now in free fall decline, but this is all direct poisoning in Africa. When you think of the ecosystem of South Africa, you know, elephants, lions, hyenas, leopards, vultures are actually more key to that than most.

They consume more meat than all the other scavengers and predators put together. Imagine you took that out of the equation; you're going to throw that whole ecosystem completely out of balance. What really saddens me is that even with us creating the biggest exposure of the vulture crisis ever done, I still don't actually think anything will happen fast enough to stop, you know, the decline. They are wonderful creatures, and we are killing them at such an extraordinary rate. They're probably going to be extinct within 5-10 years.

To cover the story properly, I had to get shots in the bush meat markets. Vulture brains and vulture parts are wanted in the witch doctor trade because they believe it gives them the ability to see into the future. It was staggering, the amount of dead wildlife there. There were leopards, lions, bits of elephant, black mambas, honey badgers, pangolins—the most trafficked animal in the world at the moment. You could just walk in off the street and buy any of it.

So, I just, you know, I had to shoot. I want people to see them at their best, which is when they're fighting. They're covered in blood, and they're utterly repulsive because that's how they are. They’re wonderful for it. But also, I want people to see them when they’re at their worst, which is their head sliced open, you know, their brains. So people got to see that; otherwise, they’re not going to get it, and that’s, I guess...