TIM FLACH (B.1958)

‘If we damage the natural world, we damage ourselves.’ Tim Flach

When Tim Flach began photographing animals, his inspiration came in part from a sense of wonderment in nature, seeking to examine human attitudes and responsibilities towards the natural world. Since then, his work has sought to illuminate the discussion that surrounds the relationship between human and non-human animals, photographing some of the most threatened species on earth for his project Endangered. Ya Yun Elegant, 2012, is a portrait of a giant panda bred at the Chengdu Research Base in China, part of a government programme launched in the 1980s to conserve the threatened species. The wild population of pandas is below two thousand. Female giant pandas are in heat for only seventy-two hours a year, and in that period, there is less than a day during which mating might lead to pregnancy. Their food source, bamboo, is highly sensitive to temperature and as a result is likely to be significantly damaged by climate change. Tim Flach’s photographs are not straightforward wildlife images – in every photograph he makes an enquiry into how human and non-human relationships reside within the context of ethics, history, science and politics.