Examining conservation organizations' use of professional photography

1. Using “Fairy Dust” to Help
Them Fly: The Strategic Use
of Photography in the
Conservation Movement
Elizabeth A. Gervais
Ph.D. candidate, Sociology
University of California, Riverside
eschw001@ucr.edu • @eagervais

2. Research Goal
• Examine conservation organizations’ use of
photography.
• Why partner with iLCP?
• What were the goals of the expedition?

3. International League of
Conservation Photographers (iLCP)
“As a project-driven organization, our goal
is to translate conservation science into
compelling visual messages targeted to
specific audiences. We work with leading
scientists, policy makers, government
leaders and conservation groups to
produce the highest-quality documentary
images of both the beauty and wonder of
the natural world and the challenges
facing it.”

4. • Drew from 25 iLCP partnering organizations
• 7 in-depth, semi-structured interviews from
July 2013 to February 2014
• director of communications, communications and
policy director, communications manager, senior
manager of marketing and science, director,
officer, president
Key staff from partnering
conservation organizations

5. Tactics
“forms of collective action publicly deployed,
whether in-person or via audio, visual, or written
media, in service of a sustained campaign of
claims making.”
-Larson 2013 p. 866

6. Choice of tactics
• Strategic and rational (least costly)
• Shaped by resources, organization, and different
political contexts
• Cultural perspective: tactical choice is a process
that involves gathering, interpreting, and
evaluating information within contexts that may be
changing, uncertain, and even contradictory

7. Art as a nimble strategy
“I think that [the emphasis on art] came from the
fact that 350.org was always working low- budget,
and the question was, ‘how do we get attention,
how do we get media, and how do we inspire people
to be a part of this?’…”
--Alex Bea 350.org (in Hestres 2013 p. 10)

8. “Nowadays we are as likely to use a shot from a
renowned, skilled, highly trained professional using
state of the art capture, processing, and image filing
equipment, as we are to use one from a cheap
mobile phone in the hands of a teenager in Kabila.”
--Wayne Minter, audiovisual manager of Amnesty
International (in Ritchin 2013 p. 105)

9. Why partner with iLCP?
• Try something new
• Enhance their current communications efforts
• Soft methods of resistance

10. People are like why are you taking
these crazy photos? Why are you
spending money on these photos?
“These forests are really, really cool…when you’re in
them you just…you feel small and big all at the same
time and…they’re captivating and…they’re like fairy
forests [that] you might have imagined as a little kid.
Everyone was like, oh my god, [she] likes to save her
fairy forest.
I just think they tell a different kind of story than words
can tell, than video can tell…it just it helps people
understand, it brings people to that place, and makes
them connect with it, in a much more personal way.”

11. Fairy dust
“Someone was criticizing it, calling it, ‘oh it’s fairy
dust.’ And so I turned around…and it was a very
important donor, actually; so I turned around and I
was like, ‘you know what? It has helped us fly. Your
fairy dust works. So call it whatever, just keep it
coming, okay, I can’t fly without dust.’”

12. Try something new
“Because we do a lot of moving images and video
and I wanted to try a different way to connect with
people. I had heard about iLCP in the past, I did not
really know exactly what they did, or what the
impact of their work was. I did think they had quite a
nice reputation, and I felt I wanted to see how that
worked, and get some nice images out of it as well.”

13. Enhancing current efforts
“Because a lot of what we do is about communicating how
wonderful this place where we work is and the wonder of the
animal, plants, forest, reef, and of course images are very
very powerful, photos are a part of that, not only photos,
images generally, by the way we deal a lot with visual art as
well, but I wanted to partner with iLCP because we really
wanted to have some powerful images to help us
communicate about the wonders of the place.”

14. Enhancing current efforts
“The iLCP…gave us the access to Daniel and some of
these other guys and we also wanted to use their
contacts as another platform, just to get the
information out there on different levels and a
different world than what we are accustomed to.”

15. Soft resistance
“I wanted to careful not to be too antagonistic
because I had a relationship with the government…”

16. Soft resistance
“I saw some of the other [iLCP expeditions] that
happened, there was one that happened the year
before called the Great Bear RAVE and it went to a
rainforest in British Columbia and looked very closely
at the Northern Gateway Pipeline, and that was a
very activist approach. We would give it more gentle
approach just because it’s a very different situation
in the Philippines where we were working.”

17. What were the goals of the
iLCP expeditions?
• Communicate
• Impact decision-makers
• Generate networks

18. Communicate
“The primary goal was to assemble a set of
compelling, wonderful, mostly beautiful, although
some were of destruction, images that could help us
tell a story in a compelling way.”

19. Impact decision-makers
“The goal for me was to have an impact on…some of
the decision-makers in French Polynesia about if they
were going to put in any marine protections. We
could give them a scientific report, which would have
a lot of numbers, facts, and percentages, and that
would not be massively inspiring but to help
somebody feel like they need to take action, there’s
a difference between statistics and emotions. If you
want somebody to feel that they need to take action
on this… you have to make them feel that it’s worth
doing something.”

20. Generate/strengthen networks
“The secondary goal of our expedition…in everything
[that] we do, we are trying to strengthen the
international partnerships that we’re in. We had two
iLCP photographers and we partnered them with one
local Indonesian photographer, so was not an iLCP
member but was one of Indonesia’s premier
professional wildlife photographers, and he joined up
as well, so another goal…was to strengthen that
partnership and have everybody learn from one
another.”

21. What can we learn from
organizations working with
conservation
photographers?
• Justification
• They understand their context
• Indirect outcomes