Why Look at Endangered Animals? Dualism, Archival Desire, and the Visual Culture of Extinction

This article examines endangered-animal photography as a prominent and often unquestioned form of conservation visual culture. Focusing on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species and Joel Sartore’s Photo Ark, it considers how photographs of endangered animals move between scientific documentation, emotional appeal, archival preservation, and conservation publicity. Framed through Val Plumwood’s analysis of human/nature dualism and its objectifying structures, this analysis argues that such images can render nonhuman life knowable as an object of human classification and intervention. While conservation photography can generate attention and concern, it can easily reproduce dualistic patterns by isolating animals from ecological relations, framing them as passive objects of visual knowledge and management, and substituting symbolic preservation for ecological understanding and protection. A less dualistic conservation visuality would not abandon endangered animals as photographic subjects, but instead situate them within the damaged, interdependent, and politically produced worlds that shape their vulnerability.