People Are Nature Too: Photographing the Whole Wildlife Story

Steve Winter loves being a wildlife photographer, but he dislikes the term.

“I’m telling a story like a photojournalist, I just happen to photograph the natural world,” he said. “But we’re put in a separate category.”

As far as he’s concerned, despite the fact that most of his pictures are of or about big cats, he’s as much a photojournalist in the conventional sense as anyone else.

Mr. Winter, 56, has been photographing wild animals for more than 20 years, mainly for National Geographic. But unlike many wildlife photographers, who “don’t do people,” Mr. Winter said he tried to tell the full story of tigers and other large cats. That includes showing the constant tension between humans and their wild surroundings, and the often-gruesome situations that result on both sides.

Steve Winter/National GeographicMany of the snares set in Sumatra are placed by families that participate in a government program that offers Javans five-hectare plots to relocate and grow palm oil. When they arrive, they plant the palms and must work on a plantation, often for very low wages, until their first crop matures in five years. To feed their families, they set snares, hoping to catch small deer and other animals, but they also commonly capture tiger cubs, like this one.

The tiger population worldwide has declined by more than 90 percent in the last century, to about 3,500 tigers, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. The reasons range from hunters killing tigers to sell their bones for medicinal purposes, to the destruction of natural habitat by human settlements.

Mr. Winter said another reason for the continued destruction of tigers and their habitat was that most people still think everything is fine. He said it was his job to pull back the veil of the idyllic natural world that is presented in nature shows and in travel advertisements.

But with so few tigers left in the world, Mr. Winter’s focus on human-tiger conflict isn’t only a moral choice, it’s also a practical one.

“I’m going to Sumatra knowing that I’m never, ever going to see a Sumatran tiger,” he said.

Instead, Mr. Winter does what any journalist would do with an elusive subject: he reports around it. In Mr. Winter’s case, that can mean traveling for 12 hours by car to take one picture of a man who killed a tiger, or spending weeks gaining the trust of wildlife park guides before they let him photograph the area.

One of the only ways Mr. Winter gets to photograph tigers in the wild is by setting up cameras with infrared beams that snap a picture every time a tiger (or any other animal) walks by.

Steve Winter/National GeographicA hidden camera captures several frames of tigers. Both of these tigers have killed people — one killed two local villagers and the other ate a park ranger. They now live in captivity, in a facility for problem tigers in Bhopal.

The camera trap images often end up being some of Mr. Winter’s most well liked, but he said he wanted to make sure to get people beyond the pretty pictures.

“All these beautiful places that people think exist in the world are just managed parks,” he said. “The most successful pictures I take are the ones that you don’t want to look at.”

Now, as the media director for Panthera, a big cat preservation nonprofit organization, Mr. Winter said he had become an activist as much as a photographer.

Mr. Winter takes his photos on lecture circuits and lets Panthera use his images to help spread the word about problems facing tigers and other big cats.

“I want the images to live on – after they run in the pages of National Geographic. ” he said.

It’s hard work that requires a delicate balance of drawing people in with beautiful photos, but then showing them something more, in hopes that they feel compelled to take action.

Mr. Winter said his job was further complicated by working in an age where his audience is continually bombarded with photos of cute animals on the Internet. A tiger carcass is no match for a cute cub, lounging around and seeming happy.

“Nobody wants all this negativity, so it’s our job to find a different way to tell the story,” he said. “I’m not saying I’m successful. I’m just trying to do it differently than anybody else has ever done it.”

Steve Winter/National GeographicIn the Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary, in Thailand.