On the other hand, there’s nothing more heightening of the senses than being close to a truly wild tiger. When you realize that you’re on the menu, you start to tingle a little bit. The first time I saw a wild tiger I was shaking so bad I couldn’t hold the camera steady — and the last time, which was two years later, I was still shaking. So it is very exciting.
So photographing tigers is, basically, sitting on the back of an elephant. The theory there is that tigers think you’re an appendage of the elephant. As soon as they see a human on foot, they’re gone. They’re usually asleep when you find them. They’re primarily nocturnal, because of the human pressures.
Right now, though, you have a whole Indian culture that’s infatuated with tigers, so there’s a mad rush to see them. There are only five or six wild tigers on Earth that have been habituated to elephants or Jeeps, in three or four parks in India, and that’s what everybody’s chasing. It turns into this really distasteful circus. There can be three or four elephants pushing a tiger, and people talking, and nobody’s being reverential. I feel like it should be a church out there.
As a photographer, I don’t recommend that people try to photograph them. It’s very intrusive to them, and I had extraordinary permissions for my work. You can’t do what I did unless you spend about a year with bureaucracy. If you want to do predators, I would say do lions and cheetahs out in the Serengeti where they don’t mind being seen, and it doesn’t effect their hunting ability and their survival. Or, you can do a lot of pretty photography of tigers in captivity — there are more tigers in captivity than in the wild.
