Joe Zammit Lucia photos are a saving grace

If you need just one single moment to be completely convinced that wildlife must be conserved at all costs, you simply need to look at any one picture taken by Dr Joe Zammit Lucia.

In the Red List, which classifies species that are endangered or threatened, published every four years by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), you'll come across some breathtaking work by Lucia, a world-renowned nature photographer.

The beauty, power and mystery that blazes from his photographs, will stay with you for life - you will never again be unaware of the need to protect these creatures. I'm looking at the photograph of the Arabian leopard taken by Lucia.

Captured against an inky black background, the animal - with its smouldering eyes and a face shorn of every expression except pure regality - pinions you to the spot, demanding your complete attention and respect. It is impossible not to concede them gracefully.

Lucia uses his camera to crush the centuries-old myth that we humans are superior to animals and hence have the right to alter their course of life on this planet. Incidentally, his photographs are not only on the IUCN list, but can also be seen on the walls of UN foyers and Natural History Museums around the world.

This UK-born photographer, who is now based in the US, was recently invited by the Al Ain Wildlife Park and Resort (AWPR) on a project to capture the images of the most endangered desert animals as part of a conservation project.

In an exclusive interview with Friday, Lucia, who is visiting the region for the first time, talks of man's attitude towards the animal kingdom, the techniques and styles he uses to capture the true spirit and unique beauty of these animals on film among other things. "The focus of my art is conservation," he says, "and I believe people can only be sensitised by pictures, because pictures have a subliminal impact on minds. The issue is: how do you get people interested in animals and the idea that it is worth conserving them? Not easy." Because, he admits, conservation is a time-consuming and expensive process.

But there are ways to solve this timelessly tricky problem. He chooses to take pictures of animals - pictures that are so heart-stoppingly beautiful that the beauty of the photograph can only come from the beauty of the subject captured. This beauty, he hopes, can work as a catalyst to make people realise the issue at the core: the conservation and care of the animals, their rightful place in the composition of our planet and the stirrings of a concern that beauty brings about.

Emotions, Lucia believes, are harbingers of change. They can create everything out of nothing. "I want people to care about animals from the heart," he says. His philosophy for his photographic art is best explained in the lines he quotes from Henry Beston's The Outermost House: "We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronise them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."

From medicine to multimedia

A qualified gastroenterologist, Dr Lucia gave up the emergency room for the dark room 20 years ago, keen to pursue his first love: photography. For the last six years he's been specialising in animal portraits of endangered and diminishing species.

"Frankly, things have become a lot easier with the arrival of digital cameras. I developed my craft bit by bit and by chance. I remember taking a picture of a rhino. I really liked the photograph but found the background horrible. So I got rid of the background and it seemed to work. Slowly I developed the technique of eliminating the background." From his love for animals he slowly worked his way into a group of people who focus on animal studies: "Sociologists, anthropologists, art academics, and so on.

"I was fascinated by the human-animal relationship and how images affect that [relationship]. For a majority of people, the only relationship they have with non-pet animals is through images.

"For instance, how many people will ever see an Arabian oryx in the flesh? So images are actually becoming important in the human-animal relationship, especially for the endangered species," he says.

Why photo exhibitions have a role to playAs a photographer, Lucia is constantly on the move, reaching out to people through magazines, books and exhibitions. Last month, he held an exhibition at the UN in Geneva, at the Natural History Museum in Paris, and at the UN in New York, among other places. He cites a study he conducted on people who watched his exhibition in Paris."I did a study in collaboration with Linda Kailoff, a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan."

Linda's speciality is animal representation through the ages, and she's written a book about this and how the images of animals reflect our cultural relationship with animals.

"We studied whether watching the exhibition of animal pictures would change people's views on animals or whether they would consider it a waste of time," says Lucia. "The study threw up some interesting facts. We found that 76 per cent of the people's views on animals changed favourably after going through the exhibition. Before viewing the exhibition their idea of animals was wild and dangerous. However, after viewing the exhibition, they considered animals to be closer to humans, as being vulnerable, and needing protection and conservation.

"The old concept of violence disappeared. Before going into the exhibition, less than 25 per cent of respondents actually mentioned conservation as something to do with animals. However, later, 75 per cent of the respondents were aware of this factor and the intensity on the issue increased by 33 per cent.

"It clearly indicates that exhibits like these do have an impact on the minds of people."

While Lucia's photographs of animals are simple and arresting, the photography session itself is a labour of love. His approach is studied, systematic and demanding.

He prefers spending a lot of time with an animal and attempts to form a bond with it. In fact, it extends to the point where the animal almost accepts his presence as part of the landscape. Patience, he says, is his biggest tool and he uses it in abundance to get the portrait needs.

How to prevent pictures from becoming ‘wallpaper'

Lucia avoids shooting animals in poses that people usually expect animals to be seen in because he believes those kinds of pictures desentisise humans to animals.

"One of the main issues for me is, how do you photograph these animals? For instance, we are used to seeing certain kinds of cat photographs. If you continue to give people the same kind of pictures, the photos will become wallpaper. So you have to find a different way to photograph a cat. I want an image that people will want to think about and feel."

His first step, therefore, is creating a concept for the picture. Once that is worked out, he shortlists the pictures he has clicked after which he processes them, obliterating the background, using back lights at the studio and concentrating on the eyes of the animal. Finally one picture makes the grade. 

Broadening horizons

The purpose of Joe Zammit Lucia's photographic mission is to create an emotional connection between people and threatened species.

Lucia shares an anecdote with Friday readers that makes it abundantly clear how little people know about desert habitats:

"A couple of years ago I was running an exhibit of my work and I was showing some people around who had an interest in conservation. One of my images was of a desert landscape and I explained that the reason I had it there was because of the importance of conserving our desert habitats. One of them piped up, ‘What do you mean conserve our deserts? All we hear about is the progress of desertification because of environmental destruction'.

"I was surprised that here was an audience who was interested in the environment but had very little understanding of the issues - especially around desert environments. It showed me how much more we have to do to get the proper messages across. It motivated me to move on with my work. The work they are doing at Al Ain is vital in this regard, especially as it concerns poorly understood issues such as desert environments."

The AWPR, through exhibiting some of the desert world's most remarkable species, is dedicated to inspiring a concern for conservation.

The art exhibit that will be planned with these photographs is intended to bring the mission of AWPR into the focus of the community and the hearts of the people.

Respect vs ridicule

"The image of an animal can affect they way you think about it," he says. Some images make you laugh, others make them look ‘cute'. That is not how I would like people to think of endangered animals. I want people to think of them as sharing this world and being entitled to as much respect as we humans deserve. I know it's not easy. What I do is create images that jolt you," he says.

"If you look at animal imagery over the years and examine the language we use when referring to animals, (for instance, saying ‘don't be an animal' when somebody misbehaves) you will notice that there is a certain cultural relationship that we have with animals. These images and linguistic expressions are reinforced over time and become a sort of self-fulfilling loop - we view animals in a certain light and picture them in a certain way.

"What I'd like to do is try and break that by creating images that are slightly counter-cultural and different from what people expect."

Lucia also believes in the theory of anthropocentricism, where human beings naturally look at themselves as the centre of creation. "We humans tend to simplify life around us by imbuing a sense of humanness in other creatures in an effort to understand them better."

He feels that this is, in some ways, a very significant aspect of how we perceive the world around us but which has contributed to the destruction of the mystery and beauty of the animal world.

"We have our prejudices. I think it extends to how we relate to things that are unlike us - and animals are not like us. We can only understand animals in human terms. The change that has happened in our culture is how we treat things that we don't understand. If you go back far enough to when people were hunters, their relationship with animals was different. Since they did not know much about animals, there was fear and there was respect. Now we apply science to what we do not know. We demystify things through science. The sense of mystery is disappearing.

"One of the things I explore through these images is whether we can create images that restore some of the sense of this mystery."

He is all for preserving the element of mystery in nature. "Let the Mystery be. I know it's hard because our culture does not allow us to do that easily," he says.

To find out more about Lucia's photographic work, log on to his website, www.joezlimages.com

Conservation is key

The Al Ain Wildlife Park and Resort is probably the only one of its kind in the world with a clear focus on conservation. In this case, the focus is restoration of the desert bio-diversity that has been largely affected by uncontrolled hunting and climate change. The AWPR has embarked on an ambitious programme of captive propagation, species reintroduction, habitat restoration and community involvement to put a stop to the loss of the desert's biological heritage.

As part of this ongoing conservation, the organisation invited Joseph Zammit Lucia to photograph the following endangered species:

• Arabian oryx
• Scimitar horned oryx
• Addax
• Mohrr gazelle
• Lion
• Arabian leopard
• Cheetah
• Sand cat
• Nubian ibex
• Barbary sheep
• Houbara bustard
• Lappet faced vulture
• Egyptian vulture
• Eagle-steppe
• Desert eagle owl
• Uromastyx lizard

• Lenses
• Storage, water
• Tripod