Guillaume Bonn’s Paradise Inc takes the rapidly changing landscapes of East Africa as both subject and argument. Developed through two decades of documentary work and expeditions across much of the continent, the book examines a region in which urban growth, economic expansion, conservation, climate disruption, and the contraction of wild habitats unfold at once. Bonn’s concern is not simply the disappearance of an untouched Africa, but the contradictions produced when preservation and development claim the same ground.

His photographs move between outward observation and a more personal sense of disorientation. Familiar images of abundant nature and African wilderness are invoked, then unsettled by signs of infrastructure, expanding cities, human intervention, and environmental strain. The resulting tension prevents nostalgia from becoming an uncomplicated refuge: the ideal of paradise appears as an inherited image, a contemporary aspiration, and a construct under pressure. Modernity is neither celebrated nor treated as a single destructive force; instead, its consequences emerge incrementally across landscapes and lived environments.

The volume also brings Bonn’s sustained project into dialogue with two accompanying voices. Journalist Jon Lee Anderson provides an introduction, while Ezekiel Ole Katato, a Maasai elder and founder of the Across Maasai Land Initiative, contributes a foreword. Their presence broadens the book’s frame beyond a solitary photographic statement, placing documentary observation alongside journalistic and locally grounded perspectives.

Published by Hemeria in 2025 as a 184-page hardcover, Paradise Inc gives long-term form to a body of work previously connected to the Africa State of Mind project. For collectors concerned with documentary photography, environmental representation, and changing conceptions of Africa, its significance lies in that sustained scope: a book-length attempt to hold beauty, attachment, loss, and accelerated transformation within the same unresolved field.