In January 2021, Loose Joints published Jack Davison’s Ol Pejeta, a forty-four-page booklet devoted to the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya, one of the largest rhinoceros sanctuaries in the world. At its center are Najin and Fatu, a mother and daughter who are the last living Northern White Rhinos in existence. Davison photographed them alongside Zacharia, their tirelessly devoted caretaker, in connection with a New York Times article about the successful in-vitro fertilization of the rhinos’ frozen eggs by a team of scientists, an effort that may soon create a lifeline to avoid extinction of the species.
The book holds nineteen duotone and seven colour plates across 245 by 265 millimetres. It is a softcover booklet housed inside an oversized folded poster: a modest object that opens into a larger one, an apt shape for pictures about fragility and protection. Loose Joints printed it using a mix of excess papers left over from other projects. Sam Anderson supplied the text, Sarah Chaplin Espenon edited the volume, and Loose Joints edited and published it.
What distinguishes the project is its refusal of the single heroic subject. Davison gives the rhinos their grace, power and pathos, but he is equally attentive to the keepers who guard them with their lives, working with dogs, weapons, drones and surveillance. The deep spiritual and physical connection between the rhinos and their keepers is as much the subject as the animals themselves. Characteristic of his work, the pictures run on strong contrasts of light and dark, and that formal tension carries the book’s emotional one: the deep tragedy of another species slipping away at the hands of mankind, set against the hope and optimism that science and innovation might still support a fragile natural world.
For a collector, the appeal lies in that double register and in the object’s economy. Davison, an English photographer, is known for a roaming, high-contrast body of work; here the assignment narrows his attention to two animals, one keeper and one place, and the sequencing and design hold that attention. A portion of the proceeds supports the work of Ol Pejeta Conservancy and the genetic project Biorescue, so acquiring the book also participates, modestly, in the story it documents.
