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The rise of social media has affected the world’s endangered species, say American photographer Steve Winter and journalist Sharon Guynup.
“The shortened attention spans have really affected the way people consume news and information,” Guynup adds. This has shrunk the space for the kind of in-depth, investigative work they do.
And this worries them, because they have seen, over 35 years, how vital such storytelling can be, in driving change, altering public policy and shifting mindsets.
Winter, 63, an independent photographer, has worked with National Geographic for over two decades. He has been named BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year, BBC Wildlife Photojournalist of the Year, and has won multiple World Press Photo awards.
Guynup, 66, an independent journalist, has won awards for her coverage of conservation science, wildlife crime, and climate change. She was also named a 2023 Changemaker by New York University.
Their investigation into the US captive-tiger tourism industry (more on this in a bit) revealed abuse and wildlife trafficking. Their 30-page National Geographic feature on it was shared with members of the US Congress by the National Geographic Society, and led to the passing of a new law, the Big Cat Public Safety Act, in 2022.
Winter’s iconic photograph from 2013, of a cougar named P-22 walking in the city park that houses the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles, became a symbol of urban wildlife resilience, and galvanised public support for an expensive wildlife bridge that is still being built, and is expected to be the world’s largest when it is done.
Winter and Guynup have been together for 35 years and have travelled the world in that time, trekking up mountains and across impossible landscapes to bring people views and news of the natural world beyond what most of us know of it.
For their immense contribution, they were awarded the Sanctuary Lifetime Service prize earlier this month, by India’s Sanctuary Nature Foundation.
But stories that make a difference take investment and time, Guynup says.
Their captive-tiger tourism story was two years in the making, and the duo spent large parts of 2019 and 2020 undercover. Their eventual story featured ramshackle roadside zoos that constantly bred big cats so they could have cubs on offer at all times. They then charged visitors a fee to pet these animals and take selfies with them. The story also featured people who had bought a tiger, set up some kind of chain-link fence around their home, and simply kept an endangered wild animal as a pet.
There was an institutional and cultural gap that allowed this to happen, Guynup says. “In the end, that story put an end to hands-on contact with and private ownership of big cats in the US.”
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The couple’s next feature will appear in National Geographic too.
Winter and Guynup are currently in Gujarat, studying and documenting the methods used at the Gir National Park, because of how well they have worked to boost the population of the Asiatic lion.
“The conservation work being done in Gir is comprehensive, encompassing 21st-century technology, community programmes and more, making this a model for conservation around the world,” Guynup says. “The national park’s relationship with tourism and with local communities is a very positive conservation story as well, in our estimation.”
It always gives them hope, they add, to tell stories that focus on solutions.
“Something else we’ve been working on for about two years in the US, is documenting efforts to create passageways through developed landscapes, particularly finding safe crossings for animals across roadways and railways. It’s a way to reconnect a fractured landscape cut up by roads and other infrastructure,” Guynup says.
The hope here is that their stories-driven campaign will yield results of the kind they saw with Winter’s P-22 photograph.
“Back then, many believed there were no mountain lions in the area. But I knew a wildlife corridor runs from the Santa Monica Mountains to Griffith Park (which houses the Hollywood sign),” he says.
It would take 15 months of watching and waiting, but eventually Winter had his iconic image. It helped raise $95 million over 10 years, for the overpass now in the works there, “proving the transformative power of photography in conservation efforts,” he says.
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Since 2022, however, with media budgets for reportage shrinking, the duo has begun to fund some of their own work, via their non-profit organisation Big Cat Voices.
“This gives us the freedom to tell the stories we need to tell,” Winter says.
But it doesn’t have to take an NGO or an award-winning story to shift the needle, he adds. “Smaller steps can also ultimately do that. I think there’s still a lot of work to be done to get to a place where we, as a planet, are really moving forward, on climate change, pollution, deforestation, on the many fronts of damage to the planet.”
Change can come from simply shifting the lens a little, Guynup adds.
Something she would love to see: Ecological costs brought within the purview of healthcare. “Because the health of the planet is directly linked to our health,” she says. “Perhaps if we took the value of clean water, clean air, and other kinds of ‘ecosystem services’ into account, then the value of a tree or an ecosystem would be higher.”
OFF THE TRAIL
* Photographer Steve Winter, 63, and journalist Sharon Guynup, 66, live in Hoboken, New Jersey.
* The one thing they miss dearly in all their time on the road, they say, is their five-year-old granddaughter Winter Rose, “who brings us the greatest joy”.
* “But we spend crazy numbers of hours working, and we work seven days a week as freelancers,” Guynup says. Winter, when he isn’t working, loves to listen to podcasts and cook. “He is a great cook… we all look forward to those meals,” Guynup says.
