Stilled Life

ONE MORNING IN JULY 2012, Asmita Parelkar waited, adjusting her large-format Toyo Field Camera, in the storage lab at the office of the United States Fish & Wildlife Service in Long Island, New York. It was Parelkar’s second day working on her Illegal Wildlife Trade photo series, which documents items confiscated by the agency that originated outside the United States. Eventually, a young inspector came in and escorted Parelkar into another room to see the latest arrivals. Inside, on a steel counter, was a cloudy bag of dead ball pythons. They had been shipped from the rainforests of Togo, and suffocated somewhere between West Africa and the US east coast. Had they survived and not been confiscated, the snakes could have been sold for large sums as exotic pets.

Though ball pythons can be imported into the United States legally, both the illegal import of sanctioned wildlife by transporters who wish to avoid fees and bureaucratic hassles and the trafficking of prohibited animals are fairly common. The illicit trade in wildlife is growing globally, with China its largest market and the United States a close second. Rare and exotic animals and plants, both living and dead, can fetch exorbitant amounts. In 2011, Global Financial Integrity, an American non-profit research and advocacy organisation, reported that the trade was worth between $7.8 billion and $10 billion per year. This commerce involves middlemen in numerous countries and at several stages, from procurement and storage to transportation and retail, making it difficult to enforce existing laws.

Parelkar was a student at the International Center of Photography in New York City when the report came out, and was already interested in documenting the relationship between humans and animals. Earlier, she had completed a project on zoos, titled Giraffe Behind The Door: Life in Captivity. With a new project in mind, Parelkar started surfing Craigslist and other forums where people discussed how to acquire and care for snakes, birds and other exotic pets. She reached out to some pet owners and traders in the hope of photographing them with their animals, but found them reluctant to be documented. The project seemed impossible, until Parelkar came upon reports of exotic animals seized by the FWS.

A few months after requesting access to the FWS’s collection, Parelkar was allowed into its heavily guarded facilities for two days. “The cold and sterile environment of the office was such a strong contrast from the natural habitats—the forests, grasslands—these animals must have once roamed in and belonged to, that it made sense to isolate them,” Parelkar said. Working with objects as small as a glass jar filled with iguana eggs and as large as a polar bear pelt, she produced clinical photographs of similar composition, under white light and against an ivory-coloured sheet.

Illegal Wildlife Trade recalls Taryn Simon’s Contraband, in which the artist photographed every item seized by customs officials at New York’s John F Kennedy International Airport over five days in 2009. While Simon documented illegal flora and fauna, disguised luxury accessories and concealed narcotics, Parelkar’s focus is narrower, and her approach is informed by a fascination with zoological and botanical illustrations, which she attempts to approximate on film. The French theorist Roland Barthes, in his seminal Camera Lucida, compared a photograph to “a living organism ... born on the level of the sprouting silver grains, it flourishes a moment, then ages ... Attacked by light, by humidity, it fades, it weakens, vanishes: there is nothing left to do but throw it away.” Parelkar’s use of a gradually disappearing medium—film photography, on a large-format camera—highlights, by analogy, the endangered status of many of the species she documents.