Photographer Joe Zammit-Lucia enlists animals

BY GEORGIA TASKER

gtasker@miamiherald.com

COURTESY OF JOE ZAMMIT-LUCIA

Feather Bed, a photo of a brilliantly colored flamingo by Joe Zammit-Lucia appears in his book First Steps: Conserving Our Environment.

• Gallery | Faces of Conservation: The photographs of Joe Zammit-Lucia

IF YOU GO

Joe Zammit-Lucia will show photos and read from First Steps, Conserving Our Environment at 8 p.m. Friday at Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables. 305-442-4408; www.booksandbooks.com. Proceeds from books sold will go to Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden.

Driving back to Miami from Homestead, Joe Zammit-Lucia saw a sign for Monkey Jungle. 'I said, 'I wonder what's there.' I thought, 'This is a peculiar facility to have here; it seems so out of the way.'''

He took his camera inside and saw the large silverback gorilla, King, in his hardwood hammock habitat, built in 2001. ''I took a few pictures of him and that's all I got, really,'' he remembered.

Today, King's image graces the front of Zammit-Lucia's book, First Steps: Conserving Our Environment (Matt Press, $50), which is based on his photography exhibition last year at the United Nations in New York.

In keeping with its message, the book is printed on paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council to be made from wood grown in sustainably managed forests and certified recycled sources. It has an additional conservation-friendly quality: Proceeds are donated to environmental organizations.

First Steps is a coffee table book, but slender. Text blocks are purposely short -- no more than 500 words -- and photos are relatively few.

''People have a short attention span,'' he said. 'I don't think it helps to have a tome. I was trying an experiment with the question `Can I communicate a message with words and images?' So it's not a photography book or an issues book. It's both.

``Hopefully, people will be attracted by the images and read some of the text, and I wanted to make it accessible.''

This Malta-born British citizen trained as a physician and then started a pharmaceutical consulting company in Cambridge, England. The company moved to New York, and in 2001, Zammit-Lucia sold it and turned to photography, a hobby that had been a lifelong love. He and his wife, Lindsey Matheson, live on Fisher Island from November through May, then spend the rest of the year at their home in Long Island, N.Y. He has a studio in an apartment on Miami Beach overlooking Biscayne Bay.

''When I first started to do photography full time, I did a little of everything, and was mainly focused on travel photography,'' he explained. ``Then I started chatting with a number of people about the portfolio I accumulated and many images seemed to have a conservation theme.''

The more he looked at conservation issues, the more interested he became, he said, ``so I adopted it as my focus.''

Animals play a major role in First Steps. He shot the animal images at zoos, then eliminated the background using Photoshop.

''I basically take what comes out of the camera as a rough canvas, and I create what I want to create,'' he said. ``Some people object to that, but my interest is in the final product. It takes time, a couple of weeks per photo, to develop the idea.''

A Bali myna was photographed at Miami Metrozoo. The lovely long-lashed giraffe was shot at the Brevard County Zoo in Melbourne, where Zammit-Lucia stood on a platform already in place so he was at eye level with the animal. ''I've tried to reshoot [a similar] image about 10 times, and can't,'' he said. ``It was the moment. It was a partial accident: He came close and I had a telephoto lens on and didn't have time to switch it out.''

The book presents succinct summaries of conservation issues. For example, ``One in four of every mammal species and one in eight of every bird species are threatened with extinction. Nearly 300 species of tree are similarly endangered. Overall, [more than] 16,000 species are on the threatened list.''

He writes: 'Are we happy to live up to the label that some have given to the human race -- Earth's `serial killer.' ''

Zammit-Lucia's goal is to apply human portraiture techniques to animal portraiture, expressing the singular look and personality of the individual.

''If we want to get closer to animals, we have to see them as individuals,'' he said. 'Nobody questions that Riley [his dog] is an individual. But when we go to a zoo, it's, `Oh, look at the monkeys.' The scientific community aids and abets this. They hate anthropomorphism.''

A lot of the environmental movement is driven by science, he believes. ''But you also have to capture people's hearts, not just their minds,'' he says. ``Art has a lot of potential to do that.''

That's why Zammit-Lucia's newest project is photographing many animals of the same species to demonstrate the bond that an exists between man and animal, and to show each animal as an individual. Not thinking of animals as having feelings, personality and character engenders disregard for animal life, he says.

He has spent several days at the Center for Great Apes in Wauchula, where he photographed chimpanzees and orangutans. He has so far selected half a dozen chimp pictures from 4,000 shots. Before returning to New York in June, he will return for another photography session.

But he has not overlooked the importance of plants. They, too, are in the book. The Pelagodoxa henryana palm, with possibly fewer than a dozen specimens left on a single mountain in the Marquesas in the South Pacific, appears, as does an opening bud of Amherstia nobilis, a tree called the pride of Burma, thought to be extinct in the wild.

In a section titled ''What We Can Do,'' Zammit-Lucia writes that avoiding products derived from endangered species is among the First Steps individuals can take. In addition, ``we can and should avoid over-harvested species, like Chilean sea bass, Atlantic cod, grouper, bluefin tuna . . . stay away from restaurants that persist in serving these species. Don't introduce exotic plants and animals.''

Urban in-fill development is another step in the right direction, he said. ''It's more efficient to air condition an apartment building than a house,'' he said. And in cities, ``people can walk. In this country, people have forgotten that you can walk.''

Compact fluorescent lights, Smart cars, new technologies for energy generation also are part of the early steps to conserving the environment, with whole new industries evolving to solve the climate change problems, he said.

''Things have moved forward a lot,'' he said. ``When it starts to matter is when it starts to inform how people vote. It's good that all three presidential candidates are positive about the environment.''