PARADISE INC.
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Hemeria
Published:1st Apr '25
Should be back in stock very soon
FINALIST OF THE 2024 LUCIE PHOTO BOOK PRIZE
“An epic new book... the photographs, often in jarring juxtaposition, underscore the cruel bargain of Western 'progress'—and the paradoxical damage brought on by a half century of conservation and preservation efforts.” —David Friend, Vanity Fair
A groundbreaking investigation into wildlife conservation, environmental transformation, and efforts to preserve Africa’s natural wilderness by French-Madagascan documentary photographer Guillaume Bonn.
Paradise Inc. offers an unvarnished glimpse into the realities of Africa’s ecosystems and our collective future, as the disruptions of climate change, economic expansion, and environmental efforts reshape the world before our eyes.
For decades, Bonn has told the stories that the world is afraid to hear, championing the silenced and refusing to turn away from the truth. Paradise Inc. is the culmination of twenty years dedicated to documenting the last days of Africa’s vast natural landscapes, where countless expeditions have taken the photographer deep across nearly every country on the continent. Far from tired stereotypes, “greenwashing” efforts, and ready-made solutions, Paradise Inc. shines an unblinking light onto the paradoxes, consequences, and truths that lurk in plain sight behind the environmental “paradise” in Africa.
Featuring an introduction by world-renowned journalist Jon Lee Anderson and foreword by founder of Across Maasai Land Initiative and Maasai elder Ezekiel Ole Katato, Paradise Inc. continues the work Bonn began as a player in the Africa State of Mind project (Thames & Hudson, 2020), now presented in its entirety.
While beautifully and poignantly illustrated, Paradise Inc. is more than a visual journey. Nostalgic and critical, it is declaration of the photographer’s love for Africa—which Jon Lee Anderson (The New Yorker) calls his “inescapable muse”—an expression of his fear that it might one day disappear, and an impassioned call to action. In this latest work, Bonn defies the clichés of a wildlife wonderland that haunt the collective imagination, instead asking uncompromising questions and inviting us to strive for sustainable solutions together.
Born in Madagascar and raised in the Comoros Islands, Djibouti, and Kenya, Bonn brings a unique perspective rooted in his French and Malagasy heritage and diverse upbringing, exploring the idea of “Africanness” in his work. It is through this intimate duality that Paradise Inc. delivers its urgent critique, unveils nuances, and captures the thrill of being in the wild.
"In a world saturated with images—where beauty is too often divorced from meaning and atrocity reduced to content—Paradise Inc. by Guillaume Bonn offers something far rarer: a work of moral clarity, radical honesty, and necessary discomfort. At once elegy and indictment, memoir and investigation, it is a searing visual and textual reckoning with colonial legacies, environmental collapse, and the politics of representation." —Alessia Glaviano, Vogue
"The time has come to face the facts, as east Africa’s age-old natural landscapes and wildlife habitats inexorably disappear. Paradise Inc. is therefore a requiem, and perhaps even an epitaph, but it is also a personal plea by Guillaume for the book’s readers to shake off their illusions and to see things as they really are, before it really is too late."—Jon Lee Anderson, The Gentlemen's Journal
"Guillaume Bonn’s photographs, part of a 20-year project to document the growing clash between animals and humans in Kenya, Somalia, Botswana and South Africa, tell a different story."—Steve Bloomfield, The Observer
"For three decades, photographer Guillaume Bonn has traversed East Africa, documenting how civilization’s quintuple threats of modernity, development, population growth, armed conflict, and climate change have imperiled the region’s wildlife, habitats, and human communities […] The result is an epic new book, Paradise Inc. […] The photographs, often in jarring juxtaposition, underscore the cruel bargain of Western 'progress'—and the paradoxical damage brought on by a half century of conservation and preservation efforts." —David Friend, Vanity Fair
“[…] Photojournalist Guillaume Bonn’s haunting images expose the dark side of Africa’s wildlife havens, which are increasingly falling victim to unchecked industrialism […] Bonn’s images expose the failure of our conservation model—one that isolates wildlife instead of integrating it.”—Elena Clavarino, Air Mail
"This is a book I have been waiting to read, and the author is the person I have been longing to talk to. Guillaume, you raise very pertinent issues that are not new to the world but rather have been ignored by the world." —Ezekiel Ole Katato, Maasai elder and culturalist, from the foreword
- Short-listed for Lucie Foundation Book Prize, Traditional Category 2024 (United States)
ISBN: 9782490952533
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
184 pages