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July 23, 2017

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Photographer’s quest to build an animal ark

THE conventional wisdom reveals that public sympathy is evoked by seeing one person in need of help, not the many.

Photographer Joel Sartore has staked over a decade of his life saying the same thing applies to animals.

As detailed in PBS’ “Rare: Creatures of the Photo Ark,” Sartore is on a quest to capture images of 12,000 species in captivity around the world, to persuade us they are worth protecting. The three-part series debuts at 9pm EDT on Tuesday on PBS stations and online.

“The animals are the poetry. They’re beautiful works of art,” Sartore said. “They do all the talking. My job is to get out of the way.

“We really want to get people in the tent of conservation, and make them realize you can’t lose half of all species and not have it come back and affect humanity in a very detrimental way.”

In his quest to build a virtual ark that captures the world’s biodiversity, Sartore has visited nearly 40 countries to make digital images of more than 6,000 species that include, roughly, 900 mammals, 600 amphibians, 1,800 birds, 700 fish and 1,200 reptiles.

He works with zoos, wildlife habitats, aquariums and other facilities caring for animals, although he ventures into the wild when needed. He and Chun-Wei Yi, the PBS series’ director and producer, focused on rare species, including New Zealand’s kakapo, a flightless bird, and the Yangtze giant softshell turtle in China. The latter has dwindled to three ancient survivors, Sartore said, with one rescued from being sold for meat decades ago by a circus owner impressed with her size.

“We hope audiences find it an important story that we’re looking to tell in ways that are beautiful, heartfelt, and often funny,” said John Bredar, programming executive at WGBH Boston.

Sartore’s appreciation of the wild was nurtured by his parents during his Nebraska youth, in which he hunted and fished with his father and shared his mother’s love of nature. A book she owned on birds included a chapter on extinct species, including the passenger pigeon that once filled America’s skies.

“I was always amazed by that, and I didn’t think that I would live long enough to see another animal go extinct. Well, in the 11 years I’ve been doing the photo ark project, I’ve probably seen 10 go extinct,” Sartore said.

It was a personal crisis that gave rise to the building of the ark. Sartore’s wife, Kathy, was diagnosed with breast cancer. Anchored at home to care for her and their three children he mulled a new course, one inspired in part by John James Audubon’s documentation of the birds and mammals of North America.

Aware that his animal photos resonated with National Geographic readers, Sartore decided to amass a “giant catalog” that would show the grand diversity of the most modest animals.

“My wife’s fine now but it was kind of a close call, and the photo ark was born out of wanting to do something that stuck,” Sartore said.

Sartore remains hopeful about the future, even as he sees species vanish.

“I don’t get sad but I do get mad,” he said. “I think, ‘Let’s use this as a shining example of what not to do.’ And surely this time, people will care. Surely they’ll care.”




 

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