Picture Perfect: Patrick Brown

my photographs are different from me the photographs a record of what's been happening in front of me it's not something I've constructed if I'm able to give a voice for that situation then I've achieved my objective and that's really important to me as an individual but also as a photographer my dick observe ad mine I love Bangkok for exactly the same reasons I hate it I love it for its noise all over for its intensity sweatiness and there's always some Trevor treasure in Bangkok and for all those reasons I just drives me bonkers sometimes and I have to leave but doesn't every place in the world must drive people crazy and happy at the same time my name is Patrick brown I'm a photographer being based in Thailand for last 12 years and yeah this is home for me for the 1yd hub so buddy my cap sometimes song palang partner I've traveled all my life since I'm about five I originally from England from Sheffield grew up in the Middle East spent some time in South Africa and I spent some time in Canada and finally the family settled in Australia when I was 13 I'm still doing what I did when I was a young boy I'm still traveling still meeting interesting people I think photography for me was the best visa I've ever had in my life I've been racing car drivers have been with homeless I've been with drug addicts and I've been with politicians of in royalty it's one of the best vehicles to move in and out of societies that normally wouldn't be able to navigate your way through it's my car that I rebuilt when I was 18 modeled on an old English car it took me about three months to rebuild it maybe even a bit longer I'm trained as a toolmaker which is somebody that makes machines and so I really enjoy working with my hands and I like the craft of photography not just taking the photograph or the equipment but actually I like to produce a photograph I like to go in the darkroom I find the dark and very therapeutic just dodging between the light and making a photograph darker or lighter here and it's hand printed that you can never make another print exactly the same and I find that really adorable I was incredibly naive about what documentary photography could do I was working in a multi-story car park and I saw a little snippet about this guy in the local rag and he was in Africa and he was the only surgeon for two and a half million people so I sold my car or my surfboard and went over there and documented him and I was there for six weeks six weeks is all I could get off from work and then came back to Australia had an exhibition it raised a lot of money for what his name is Robert Whedon wearing awareness for him in Australia and then it was published in Australia and it won a couple of awards it was one of the pivotal points when I realized you could actually make a difference with a photograph and it wasn't until about 96 98 that I made a decision I could actually make money from this and then start to do more and more work with magazines in Australia this is all animal trade belly full of animal animal stock as you can see everything's under alphabetical order only I know where to find it a colleague convinced me just get out of Australia and come to Asia have a look around if you don't like it you can move on then I ended up in Chiang Mai and met some Burmese refugees they gave me access to places I would never be able to get to and opened up my whole will to me that I really didn't know existed to the extent that he did and that was the Burmese border this is on the thai-burma border and their macaques and then you've got actually real tiger teeth here and Tiger claws they and these are different different tiger teeth and they have a different value of where they come from these are used as potency or protective elements regarding the person that wears them the a Bama lights on them or into keychains and things I have trading to extinction I started working on it in 2002 this is my first solo book and I had no idea what the animal trade was about for me the animal trade was little trinkets selling in shops at that stage and most of the world thought that I think in some way thought the same four years ago the statistic was 52 billion dollars annually that's what the animal trade is worth which rivals some of the biggest electronic industries one of my favorite statistics from this whole project is that there's more Bengali Tigers in Texas than there is in in the Bay of Bengal it's a huge industry and I would be still working on this until probably the day her died so had to be some physicality of boundaries placed Southeast Asia was the spot and plus I live here it made made it quite logical his patrolling in southern southern Cambodia and a place called buckle it was really quite an amazing trip that one the first story I did was anti-poaching team in Baku and thus anti-poaching team we're going on a night in surgeon and we would hunt down or trace down the poaching team and most of the guys in the actual anti poaching team actually exposures because there's nothing better than a poacher to catch a poacher he knows his routine and as his habit they're about to plan to do a night insurgent which I have to say is one of the scariest things to do because you're in total darkness and you can only just see the person in front of you and away your eyes work they're the center of your retina is actually damage from the amount of Sun it's had but their peripheral is so you have to look at the corner eye so you're walking with your eye so you can that's the most sensitive part of your eye it was pretty intense trip that one this is a poacher that's been caught and that's his name is age and the crime and where it was on the date obviously and they did it to all the poachers that are captured I have quite a lot of empathy for the poachers majority of the poachers are just doing what their ancestors have done which is hunt the Cambodian poachers that I went with they were I think they got 10 or 15 dollars for each monkey very very little money they have very very little knowledge of where that products going to go this is pretty much all be taken so take ten or four cameras my polaroid Rolleiflex in their clinic ons and three lenses go and my film back welcome to guangzhou from bangkok Guangzhou is close to the Hong Kong border its southwest China edits the economic powerhouse for this region it's very close to Shenzhen which is the manufacturing powerhouse of China due to the wealth of the manufacturing of machine jam and the money that's come into this area this has always been a fruitful place for animal trafficking what I'm hoping to to achieve is to see where we are five years down the track it's a 10-year project so where was I halfway through this project I was here less the last time it's good to come back and relive it and see where we are and what I'm hoping to find is that things maybe have moved on I don't think the trade is in any way doing gold I think it's just they've just got smarter about hiding it they're not as confident as they used to be they know these things do get out into the world outside China so they're a bit more paranoid about people with cameras oh Allah Johnny Booker you make time you do see back I never asked permission I just get in there and I know I've we have a very short window of opportunity to get the pictures as soon as you start to ask for permission people and they are not going to be themselves and a few times I push it and I push it if somebody's stopping me from taking pictures or tries to stop me from taking pictures I push it in further because there's a reason why this person is trying to stop me because he knows they're doing something wrong so I'm trying to get the hardest thing in a photograph is capturing an emotion so if I'm able to capture this angry person trying to stop me from taking pictures it also adds another little dimension to the body of work we went to one PET SHOP which specialized in selling fish one fish in this particular shop was I think was with about $10,000 the people owned the shop they openly talks about how he smuggled the the fish in from Australia and smuggled them in from the Philippines Livia's from us us so that's an American fish in China okay so just gonna festive eat up a lot of fish arrows are like they did yeah these guys are untouchable they're just just not on the radar the law enforcement officers it's not important enough for them everything in the market isn't in don't you know that's where that gray zone of the wildlife trade comfortably sits in and we'll use the crocodile as an example two and a half thousand tons of live animals go through Heathrow a day you have a shipment of say 2530 crocodiles so the custom guys at Heathrow he's looking for contraband is looking the drugs but he's not a reptile expert so he counts that he crocodiles ticks it off yep move on in that thirty they could be ten very very endangered crocodiles Gwen Joe is also very famous for its wild game restaurants but one of the most common things is you can go choose your alligator choose your crocodile and this particular restaurant is just out there in the open it's got its snout bound and guess that's the first thing they see when they walk into the restaurant is a crocodile I want that crocodile to be chopped up and I want it for my dinner that's all you have to say and it will be done with the animal trade with the consumption of animal it's more to do with you are what you eat so you consume piss the tiger you'll inherit a part of that tiger and you become more virile and stronger and you'll fight off a cold or you'll beat the arthritis most of the animal is consumed in some formal manner or used in to develop a cream or a soup or a tea or something like that we went to Safari world which is about 40 minutes outside the central guangzhou it's just a huge entertainment complex for families and revolves around animals there is a circus and there is a zoo and I do agree with them yeah they're very educational and you need those institutions but realistically an elephant in a zoo is actually is a prisoner they've got X amount of space and they know that X amount of space on the back of the hand zoos make a lot of money there are there are great money oh and the rarer the animal you have all the rarer collection of animals you have the more people are going to go see them some zoos are legitimate and some Louvre art and the majority of zoos in in this part of the world are not so legitimate when we went to the safari world they have flamenco's in restaurants so people can have a nice steak and and watching a pink flamenco which is obviously not native to Asia then in another restaurant you have the white tiger restaurant Lee you can sit down and have your meal and watch probably one of the most endangered tigers in the world walk around why they have a meal and supposedly during that in this particular institution has 50% of the world's population of white tigers that's something wrong with I'm not an animal activist it's more about exposing the subcultures in society the animals is not really the story what's happening to the animals is the story and and that cause is actually these subcultures of smugglers and poachers and customers that's what I'm interested in my career as a photographer in the last ten years is being focused around the animal trade I've spent every little penny I've earned has gone back into this project and one of the biggest discussions I had with publishers was that it was in black and white if I'd shot this in color I think I would have had no problems it would have been printed straight away but for some one reason because it's in black and white it scares people away financially the reason I shot it in black and white was a really simple reason yeah I really understand black and white film I dream in black and white I don't dream in color so on a subconscious level I think black and white is more of a powerful tool to let people delve more into their sub consciousness to actually get a bit more of a sense of placement they let their imagination go a little bit further than they would do if they were looking at a color photograph for me it really tells a story in a much more clearer sense we visited the guangzhou medicine market which is a very famous institution it's pretty wacky we see a lot of crazy things there from seahorses geckos drying on the street turtles a multitude of different creatures for sale and parts of different creatures what drives industry's naivety and greed naivety in the sense of lack of education regarding what these health benefits from some of these products do rhino horn is one of the classics it's if you consume a rhino on mythology believes that you'll be able to mate for two or three hours it doesn't work but it's very porous so one of the tricks of the trade is to soak the rhino horn actually in the viagra so that drives the trade as well that's all this naivety and it works because it's soaked in vibra a bag of DM bureaus few hundred years ago people would be invited to a wedding and just the immediate family would have shark fin soup and guests would stand around and all that they were able to eat shop and so it was a very sought-after delicacy now the wedding parties have grown to three or four hundred people and they all have shark fin soup when you look at the shark fins and you see the bags and hundreds of bags of this stuff and three thins basically means one one shark it's just a staggering amount of sharks that have died for something that's basically cartilage and doesn't taste of anything well we're in the medicine market in going Joe this guy in a blue tracksuit comes up to me I'm taking pictures and he's trying to sell me some bear bile products he was a little bit uncomfortable with the Chinese watching him and watching the deal go down so we get him aside and we go we go talk about her charged with use he said he bought it off some guy who was either from Tibet or from Nepal and he got a customs official on the border to get it in to China and he's gone to Guangzhou which traveling thousands of kilometres to sell to two items shows you how much of a hub Guangzhou is after 9/11 there was a big push to find out who are the people who are generating income for the the terrace and the smuggling routes and it wasn't until Congress decided to put a lot of funding into that once it was researched it pretty much took everybody by surprise how big the animal trade was did this fish on salon what about just that you must give the camera well did you check some crowd I understandable is doing something this illegal we just will just stand in there and my camera will stay out here okay we're just standing it that camera doesn't come ten years in the project I've never had somebody literally come up to me and want to do the deal there and then and totally blase about it all he saw me as an opportunity to try and make a quick deal he wanted a thousand dollars basically for a very small amount of bear bile game thank you this is the last trip for the animal trade this is it I'm 43 years old been doing this for just under a quarter of my life a few months from now people will be holding a book in the hands and it will no longer be my book at the table always new I get to this stage but now I'm here actually it's kind of weird that it doesn't actually feel like this really happened 10 years in the making and it's going to where I initially thought it would always go it's quite a nice feeling actually after you

Channel: Incase

Views: 142,048

Rating: 4.9621534 out of 5

Keywords: VICE, VBS, Picture Perfect, Photography, Photographer, Journalism, Guangzhou, China, Animals

Id: HSmzGIFhHHo

Length: 21min 24sec (1284 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 11 2012