Elephants in Between (a photographic exhibition by Brent Lewin)
Elephants In Between
Overview
Since 2007 I have been documenting the plight of the Asian elephant in Thailand. Once a symbol of honour, dignity and the engine of rural development, many of these once proud creatures have been left on the fringes of Thailand’s modern economy and have come to represent the failures and inequity of the country’s economic development.
My work in this area is mainly informed by the experience of the Gouey mahouts of Isaan who proudly hold the title of being the first to capture wild elephants in the region. The plight of the Thai elephants and their caregivers is a narrative that is played out in different forms in many developing countries across the world. It is the story of a struggle to preserve traditional cultural identities in a rapidly changing economic landscape.
Bio
Brent Lewin (b. 1979, Canada) is a self-taught photographer currently residing in Toronto and Bangkok and a contributing photographer with OnAsia and Redux Pictures. His work has largely focused on the plight of the Asian elephant and their caregivers in Thailand. Brent's work has been featured in publications such as National Geographic, New York Times, Discovery Channel Magazine and Newsweek. His work with elephants has been awarded by Pictures of the Year International, Prix de la Photographie Paris (Px3), the International Photography Awards, American Photo and the FCCT Photojournalism Annual. He was also selected by Photo District News as one of the PDN 30 photographers in 2010. Brent is currently involved as associate producer and videographer on a feature length documentary, Elephants Never Forget, produced by CanazWest Pictures in coproduction with the National Film Board of Canada starting later this fall, which explores the plight of the Asian elephant and the modern human-elephant relationship in Thailand and China.
Categories: Public Service Announcement, Thailand Elephants, Regional Elephants
Anantara Hosts Powerful ‘Elephant in Between’ Photographic Exhibition
“Since 2007 Brent Lewin has been documenting the plight of the Asian elephant in Thailand,” explains John Roberts on the reason for the exhibition. “Once a symbol of honour, dignity and the engine of rural development, many of these once proud creatures are perhaps a symbol of those left behind by Thailand’s recent rapid development” continued Mr. Roberts.
The photographic exhibition tells a story of the discord between the struggle to preserve the centuries old tradition of an elephant and his mahout caretaker in our rapidly changing world. With a strong focus depicting the manifestation of this reality, as well as the repercussions of failing to come to terms with it, Lewin enraptures his audience with truly thought provoking snapshots.
In addition to Thailand, where elephants have largely outlived their traditional functions, Brent’s work has also recently begun exploring the plight of elephants in neighbouring Lao PDR and Myanmar where they are still being used in the logging industry. In these relatively forested countries, domestic elephants are being employed to their own demise through habitat loss resulting from uncontrolled logging.
“If Thailand’s trajectory is any indication of where its neighbours are headed, these elephants and mahouts may soon face the uncertain future of their counterparts in Thailand today, Mr. Roberts concluded.
The Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation (GTAEF) is dedicated to bettering the lives of street elephants and has now rescued and relocated over 34 elephants and their mahouts and families off the streets of Thailand and to a lush 160 acre base camp in Chiang Rai.
To join the fundraising efforts, donations can be made via ‘Friends of Conservation’ in the USA friendsofconservation.org/GoldenTriangle.htm or through the charity administrator John Roberts jroberts@helpingelephants.org.
Exhibition dates: 03 September at 18:30 - 15 October at 16:00 Exhibition location: Foreign Correspondents' Club of Thailand, The Penthouse, Maneeya Centre, 518/5 Pleonchit Road, Pathumwan, Bangkok, Thailand.
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...the opening speech I didn't give in full as the parameters changed somewhat, the thoughts are, I think valid so I thought I would put it up here (I did a lot of practicing, so I have to unleash it on someone, you are the unlucky few).
PS. On a serious note, the picture at the bottom is distressing, click away now if you do not want to be distressed.
PPS. The point about rarely finding street elephants nowadays was questioned by the Bangkok resident crowd who felt that the eles are sneaking back in.
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Welcome Ladies & Gentlemen
Unfortunately your photographer, Brent Lewin, couldn’t be with us this evening and so it falls to me to introduce his photographs as well as explain why Anantara Resorts & Spas welcomed the chance to support this exhibition.
My name is John Roberts, Director of Elephants for Anantara Resort & Spa, Golden Triangle & more importantly for the purposes of this evening, the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation.
I hope I am not to self-serving in my interpretation of the photographs as they touch very closely on what I do for a living.
The title of the exhibition, Elephants in Between, can be taken several ways, despite revolving around the same species, the Asian Elephant, there are two distinct collections of photographs here today, taken in different countries at different stages of development.
The first set, ironically taken after the second, but here representing the past for Thai elephants is the collection taken in the logging camps of Myanmar or Burma & Laos. I say that it represents the Thai past as the taking of trees for timber here was banned in 1989 for a number of reasons, not least because we were running out of trees; overnight Thai elephants & their mahouts had their centuries old occupation (their raison d’être if you like, the oft quoted figure of 50,000 domestic elephants in 1950 would not have been that high if there had been no work for them to undertake – in short there were 50,000 elephants because there was work for 50,000 elephants to do) removed. Their only choice was to work illegally or to, illegally, go across borders to seek work.
Not that we ought to fall into the trap of glorifying the logging days as a golden age for elephants, logging was and remains hard and dangerous work, though best practices were written for forestry and for elephants' part in it they were hardly ever followed in any of the logging eras, it seems, an up to 90 year cycle between harvesting certain areas of forest is too long a time scale for a businessman to comprehend and so logs were removed at an unsustainable rate, short cuts were taken and elephants overworked. Another legacy of the logging days is the old training methods, it was because of the economic need to catch juvenile elephants from the wild, rather than feed an otherwise useless baby for fifteen years before it could work, that training techniques such as the one pictured were developed, designed to take a fully strong wild elephant from its herd and to bend it’s will to that of the mahout, designed for a purpose no longer in existence but, albeit illegally & allegedly, still in use today for baby elephants – to me the most controversial photograph here.
It is worth pointing out that these methods have been banned by the Thai government and that it has been the Thai mahouts that have been instrumental in helping to develop training techniques to suit today's less urgent environment where baby elephants grow up with their mother, other baby elephants and a human family.
In a way, the second collection are the ‘Elephants in Between’, these are Bangkok’s street elephants – a phenomenon, until recently, commonly seen and now rarely found thanks to initiatives in Bangkok to strengthen the law and, hopefully, in the elephants’ home in Surin to make home existence comfortable & feasible. Though a certain number of them continue to work the streets of Chiang Mai & other provincial towns at night.
I’m convinced street begging began in response to the 1989 logging ban and as a function of the genuine high regard of Thai people for their elephants, in Chiang Saen, when we take elephants out of our forest for whatever reason the natural reaction of people, especially older people, is to make merit by feeding it.
In the beginning it must have been a way for mahouts to earn a living for themselves & their elephants without resorting to illegal behaviour, as mentioned in the 1987 movie ‘Khun Liang Chang’ which dealt with forestry & elephant care in exactly this period – a mahout can’t live on elephant shit.
Over the years this practice developed for tourism & the modern world, babies were cuter so people were more likely to give, when the lawmakers began to take notice and ban, via city ordnances citing pollution and traffic offences to start with and, more recently the act of feeding a street elephants, babies were also easier to transport & easier to hide.
Mahouts were still mahouts, gui people were still gui people, they still had to own an elephant as part of their identity and these were the ‘Elephants in Between’ that Brent found and embedded himself with.
These are also the people we know and work with through our street rescue in the Golden Triangle and one of the reasons we were happy to support the exhibition is that Brent has managed to capture the care that the mahouts give to their elephants despite living an existence that they wouldn’t have chosen. These are people proud of their tradition and not gangsters out for a fast buck, something they are all too easily portrayed as elsewhere.
XXX - HERE I TALKED ABOUT OUR CAMP AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF RESCUE RENTAL, COVERED ELSEWHERE IN THESE PAGES – XXX
As a final point I would like to go back to the Burmese photograph of the elephant being trained in the older, brutal, manner, the manner developed in logging days to turn an almost fully grown wild elephant into a worker as fast as possible.
You’ll note that the elephant undergoing the training is a young one, perhaps four or five years old, THERE IS NO MARKET FOR AN ELEPHANT THAT YOUNG IN BURMA, the only market I know of for elephants that young is in Thailand, to me this photograph is as clear an indication of what happens when we buy a baby elephant in Thailand as possible, a baby is taken from the wild in Burma and beaten into submission to fill the market we drive.
So I’d like to end on this note, today’s unsustainable practices, however well intentioned, are, I fear, trapping elephants as a species in an endless cycle of past & present, let’s work together to make today’s elephants truly are the Elephants in Between a hard, sometimes cruel, past and a sustainable and comfortable future.
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