Standing up to wild elephants and oil executives, environmental photographer Carlton Ward Jr. balances shared interests and ends up with art.
By LENNIE BENNETT
Published April 11, 2004
[Photos by Carlton Ward Jr.]
While photographing the wildlife in the Congo Basin in Gabon, Carlton Ward Jr. notices a hippo in the river. The hippo submerges, is gone awhile, then resurfaces near Ward, who is wading with camera in hand.
One of 73 species of frogs found in the Gamba Complex, this one was featured on the October cover of Smithsonian magazine.
A studio shot of green-headed sunbirds.
The exhibit in Largo also includes Ward’s nature photography from Florida, such as this beach scene.
Carlton Ward Jr. and an elephant are facing off in a clearing of Congo Basin forest on the equatorial lip of the Earth. The elephant has a "Maybe gonna charge" look. Ward, more tentative, has a loaded camera.
If you were placing a bet on who would stare down whom, and you knew anything about Ward and elephants, you would probably ignore the obvious and bet on man over beast.
As it happened, the elephant blinked first. Turned and walked away. But not before Ward had caught the animal on film.
That photograph, and hundreds more, have been published in a new book, The Edge of Africa. It is the result of a 21/2-year Smithsonian Institution project, where Ward joined a research team of about 30 scientists sent to Gabon, a small West African country, to document and inventory the wildlife of its rain forests.
An exhibition of prints from the book will open at the Packinghouse Gallery in Largo on Thursday.
The project was historic and ambitious: to study the Gamba Complex of Protected Areas, an ecosystem millions of years in its evolution, some of it almost untouched by human intervention, for conservation purposes. It involved a partnership between the government of Gabon, the Smithsonian and Shell Gabon, which has oil-drilling operations in some of that nation's most sensitive environmental areas.
That Ward, 28, became part of the distinguished team is a measure of the determination and vision that got both the shot of a cranky elephant and his book to publication, through myriad differences among the major players.
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The eighth-generation Floridian describes himself as an environmental photojournalist, though he has had little formal training in photography. He comes from a prominent local family, the Carltons; his great-grandfather was governor from 1929 to 1933, his grandfather was a judge and later part of a prestigious Tampa law firm and his uncle, Doyle Carlton Jr., who died about a year ago, was a former state senator and cattle rancher. Carlton Ward grew up in Clearwater, where his father practiced law.
"I was always around the water," he said. "But I was in the woods a lot, too, hunting, riding horses."
Along with a well-connected political legacy, Ward was raised in a culture of Old Florida cattle ranching and citrus groves, roaming the huge tracts of grazing land family members own in Hardee County.
"On the ranches, you learn how Florida used to be," he said. "You learn to want to protect what's left."
He had no clear career path, majoring in biology at Wake Forest University with minors in anthropology and environmental studies.
"I started traveling as an undergraduate," Ward said. "I sort of designed a semester abroad program for myself in Australia. I took an automatic camera but it got stolen. I borrowed an old Pentax and became more involved with how to take a picture. I came back hungry for more."
He talked his way onto the university newspaper and yearbook as a photographer.
"I had no darkroom experience, so I learned a lot there," he said.
In 1997, he received a summer scholarship to study wildlife management in Kenya. Later that summer, he went to Duke University for graduate courses at its marine lab in South Carolina. He discovered that the photographs he took were useful in his group presentations and began taking nature shots for that purpose "but without a real defined idea of what photography was as a profession," Ward said.
That fall, having graduated from Wake Forest, he was accepted into an internship program at the Smithsonian.
"Basically, I was scanning slides in the National Museum of Natural History," Ward said. "But it put me in such an amazing place. The people who came through there were all the experts in their fields. Through that job I met the people with whom I eventually worked for the Gabon project."
After the internship, he enrolled at the University of Florida for a master's degree in interdisciplinary ecology. He also took three photography classes "and became aware of the field of photojournalism."
In 2001, he was a summer intern in the photography department of the St. Petersburg Times.
"That built my confidence," he said. "It built my eye. I became more reflexive though I knew I wasn't right for that kind of photojournalism."
Another internship with the Smithsonian sent him to Gabon, where work was beginning on the biodiversity project.
"I recognized there the synergy between photography and science," Ward said, "the possibility of broadening the scientific voice using photographs."
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Gabon sits on Africa's Atlantic coast, straddling the equator, bordered by Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea to the north and the Republic of Congo to the south and east. It is smaller than most African nations - about the size of Colorado at 103,347 square miles - and more politically stable. For most of the 20th century, it was a French colony. Though it gained independence peacefully in 1960, the official language and much cultural influence remain French. Western interest in Gabon was sparked by the discovery in the 1960s of significant deposits of petroleum, manganese and uranium.
When the oil companies first came to Gabon, they cared little about preserving the dense rain forests that cover about 75 percent of the country. But since the 1990s, after Shell Gabon had to spend $7-million cleaning up its pollution, the company has tried to be more responsive to environmental concerns. That led it to call in the Smithsonian Institution to assess the biodiversity of the Gamba Complex, a 4,400-square-mile preserve of dense forest interspersed with wetlands that sweeps down to broad Atlantic beaches. It's a place in which hundreds of animal species try to coexist with a major Shell Oil operation.
The Gabon Biodiversity Program was launched.
* * *
The Smithsonian offered Ward a modest salary and expenses such as travel costs to photograph the animal and plant life the Smithsonian scientists would be studying. Ward hoped his work could be used as the basis for his master's degree thesis at the University of Florida.
What the scientists wanted was straightforward specimen photography that would inventory their findings and provide a baseline reference for monitoring the area.
Ward realized they needed something more.
"I thought we should do something that had research credibility but was designed to reach a broader audience," he said. "Scientists have a quantitative approach. I tried to be more journalistic."
What they all got was a compromise in which nothing had to be compromised.
Ward began in July 2001, setting up a temporary studio for the specimen photographs. In poured the animals. Bats glaring at the camera, spiders weaving webs, frogs and snakes wrapped around tree branches, tiny hummingbirds and large parrots, crabs, worms, whiskered fish glowing with iridescence in a tank of water - hundreds of species were set against black backgrounds. Ward photographed them from several angles using strobe lighting, and then the animals were released back into the wild.
"That was the scientific component," Ward said. "No one had ever intensely inventoried the biodiversity of Gabon before. We photographed about 400 species in the studio. It's not comprehensive but it's close."
Ward pushed his superiors for permission to photograph animals in their habitats, along with the people who shared their space and the land itself.
"My argument was we can't tell the story about a place without seeing the place in a wider context."
He saw his work as a possible - and potentially powerful - tool for conservation.
He saw a book.
"It was always my goal," he said.
He took his equipment into the field and battled the elements.
"The rain is almost constant and intense," he said. "You can never count on good lighting so you have to work quickly when the sun comes out. The humidity is hard on everything. I don't know how many cameras died. A couple drowned (in rising flood waters). One was broken when a gorilla crashed a camera trap" (a set-up in which a camera is rigged with an infrared beam that is activated when an animal crosses through it, so the animal is basically taking its own picture).
He said that except for a few incidents such as the uncomfortably intense interest of the elephant and an unexpected encounter with a hippopotamus while he waded in a river, "I was never attacked. I tried to be careful, and you always have an escape route."
Many on the team, Ward said, remained skeptical about his idea for a book "with pretty pictures. It was a learning process on both our parts. Not always smooth going, maintaining my vision and pushing the need for journalistic photographs within the scope of the work."
He spent about eight months in the rain forests, mostly camping out, to get field pictures. In all he made six trips to Gabon in two years, including a solo visit for aerial photography of the Gamba Complex, which he thought was needed in the book.
Back in Washington, his Smithsonian contacts found a publisher.
"He needed for it to be a commercial book, so he designed it as a really superficial thing, more like just a picture book," said Ward. "I told him we couldn't do it that way but we realized we needed to find money to offset the costs if he felt he couldn't make any money doing it our way. So we approached the Shell people. They agreed to buy 5,000 copies and give them as Christmas presents."
But Shell wanted to be recognized prominently in the book, asking, for example, that its corporate logo be put on the cover.
"I persuaded them that the book would lose its credibility if we did that," Ward said, "that people would think it was just a propaganda piece."
Like the elephant, the oil behemoth backed down. That left Ward with a green light and 30,000 images to edit down to several hundred.
The book was released in February in Gabon, presented with great ceremony to officials there in conjunction with an exhibition of some of the prints.
"It was wonderful to see the pride people took in the beauty of their land," Ward said. "The people there who still live close to the land have a tremendous respect for it. But about 50 percent now are urban, with Western aspirations, and they have a French educational system with a lot of their textbooks coming from France. So many of the kids didn't know they have leopards in their own country.
"The oil workers who came hadn't perceived the rain forest as anything more than a bunch of trees. This opened their eyes. That was progress, in my opinion."
* * *
The Edge of Africa is handsomely printed on 317 pages of high-quality stock, all with Ward's color photographs and text by Michelle Lee, an ecologist who is part of the Gabon team. The Smithsonian owns the copyright to the text; Ward owns the photos, and the Institution has, Ward says, unlimited access to them for research purposes. Forewords are written by Gabon's President El Hadj Omar Bongo; U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell; chairman of the committee of managing directors of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group Sir Philip Watts, and Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence M. Small.
It's an accessible work of scholarship and beauty with text in English and French, divided into sections documenting the area's biodiversity and interspersed with atmospheric field shots providing an overview of the grasslands, inland waterways and coastal areas. Other sections focus on the oil industry's presence and village life.
"It's specifically about the Gamba Complex," he said, "but it's a window to the entire country."
Ward sees the book as a tool for instilling pride of place in the Gabonese, to see the uniqueness and fragility of their homeland.
"It celebrates what they intuitively know is right. They're at a pivotal place right now," he said. "They have the opportunity to do the right thing socially and economically for the long term."
Ward uses the same mix of optimism and pragmatism as he turns to other environmental projects.
He's finishing his master's degree and is off soon to Mali, in western Africa near Timbuktu, to photograph a rare population of desert elephants for a conservation project.
Travel to distant places, he said, will probably always be part of his life. But he bought a house in Tampa "because Florida is my home, though I plan to spend no more than six months a year in it.
"I feel I should spend half my time on Florida environmental issues. I'd like to start an institute to document the landscape for conservation. I'd do anything I could to celebrate the natural aspects of it, to develop pictures as political tools, perhaps partner with wildlife organizations. Once I define my mission, I think I can find funding.
"It's amorphous at this stage," Ward said. "But so was this book two years ago."
An exhibition of photographs by Carlton Ward Jr. from The Edge of Africa and a Florida series opens at the Packinghouse Gallery, 10900 Oakhurst Road, Largo, on Friday and continues through June 30. Ward will sign books on Saturday from 3 to 7 p.m. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday. (727) 596-7822. The Edge of Africa (Hylas Press, $39.95) can be ordered from any Internet or traditional bookstore. Copies will be for sale at the Packinghouse Gallery and at the Tampa Gallery of Photographic Arts in Tampa.
