Trading to Extinction follows the illegal wildlife trade through more than a decade of Patrick Brown’s photographic reporting. The project connects distant forests with international trafficking centres, treating the movement of animals and animal products as a network sustained by profit. Brown’s black-and-white photographs give visible form to an activity whose routes often remain concealed from ordinary public view.

The publisher describes a business reaching from Asia into cities including Beijing, Bangkok, London, Tokyo and New York. Its account emphasises the large differences between what a poacher receives and what a product may command farther along the supply chain. Read in the context of the project’s period, these examples explain the financial pressures driving exploitation. The book also considers international efforts to interrupt that trade, placing acts of cruelty within a broader system of distribution and demand.

Journalist and photographer Ben Davies contributes a personal introduction. His earlier writing on the endangered-species trade provides a related perspective, while Brown’s sustained visual reporting supplies the central photographic record. The combination of extensive text and images makes the book useful for readers who want to understand the connections between individual encounters, commercial incentives and an international problem.

Dewi Lewis published the book in 2014 to coincide with the London summit on illegal wildlife trade. The hardback contains 168 pages and 115 duotone photographs, with dimensions of 300 by 225 millimetres. Its value for a photobook reader lies in the sustained documentary commitment and in the relationship between visual evidence and written explanation. The subject calls for attentive reading, with the historical context of the reporting kept in view.