From weather to wildlife

THERE are times when, looking through a camera lens, Trai Anfield feels uneasy. As a wildlife photographer, she aims to capture the essence of her subject in all its majestic beauty. She knows, however, that she might just as easily be looking down the barrel of a gun, going in for the kill.

Her awareness of these two conflicting intentions is what prompted Trai’s new exhibition, The Trophy Room. Through it, she hopes to highlight what she sees as the abhorrent practice of killing animals as prizes and persuade people that it would be much better to pick up a camera and photograph them instead.

Having established her own company, Enlightened Media, which organises Enlightened Photographic Safaris, Trai leads parties in expeditions all over the world. She’s often reminded that, in certain areas, trophy hunting remains prevalent. “Sometimes you hear a shot from far away and think, ‘What are these people doing?’, and then you see pictures with a dead lion draped over someone,” says Trai, who lives in Whitley Bay. “I just find it obscene that people would do that to a creature.”

Having trained as a meteorologist, Trai began her career working for the BBC, becoming well-known as a Look North weather forecaster. She moved to London to present Radio Four’s natural history programme, The Living World, but missing the North-East, which she feels offers many photo opportunities, returned to focus on her own company.

The decision partly stemmed from health problems. Since her early 20s, Trai has suffered from ME, which she says have made her focus on her priorities. “When I was first diagnosed, I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t look after myself – it was a horrifying experience,” she says. “I was told at that point that I would probably never work again – I think the phrase that was used was ‘You might be able to do a little bit of light secretarial work’. I thought, ‘I know I could never let that happen’.

“I spent seven years away from work and got myself back at the BBC. I really was desperate to prove all the medical opinions wrong. Quite often I would come off air and I would be shaking and have to lie on the dressing room floor.”

Thankfully, now – provided she’s sensible – Trai can manage the condition, and it doesn’t stop her from travelling the world, passing on her photography skills to clients on safaris. She’s just come back from the Arctic, where she led a seaborne expedition.

“It’s been a real change for me,” she says. “Normally, I spend a lot of my time going to hot, exotic places, but in the last couple of years, I’ve got a real affinity with the cooler areas of the world and I just keep finding myself heading back there because they’re so beautiful and so different.”

Central to Trai’s photography is respect and she aims of form a relationship, however transient, with her subject, which adds real depth to the image. She hopes to pass this on to her students, and gets a real buzz from teaching.

“Most people come to learn a little bit more, to improve, to tweak their creativity, and to really think about the purpose of their shots and turn a nice snap into an absolutely fantastic shot,” she says. “It’s a lovely thing, sharing with people, as well. I started training with the BBC, teaching people to use video cameras to tell their own stories, and I got the teaching bug then. It’s something that I do these days as well. I train up-and-coming film makers.”

Though she had always dabbled in photography, it was through film that Trai came to it professionally, rediscovering her love for capturing stills. Now she combines the two, making educative films for charities. In the first six months of the year, she helped raise £625,000 for causes like the Children’s Heart Unit Fund at Newcastle’s Freeman Hospital, St Oswald’s Hospice and Lifespan.

For Trai, there is something magical about animals that photographing them gives unique access to. “I’ve had very emotional encounters with lots of different animals but I think the one that stands out is the trip with the gorillas in Rwanda last year, which was phenomenal – I think they are my absolutely outstanding shoot of all time,” she says. “It was such a privilege. It was so intense and so personal. For a start, it’s a very authentic experience because you have to trek to get there and find the gorillas and you really have to work hard to get your images, which I think is fantastic in wildlife photography.

“The big silverback came so close to me that I could feel his breath and smell him. It’s not etiquette to outstare a big male gorilla and you also have to physically bow down to him, because being taller than him is a threat. I had no problem in bowing down to that guy – he just brought out an awe in me.”

Yet working so closely with animals has its downside – Trai can’t bear to hear of any avoidable death, saying she “felt devastated” by the recent killing of a gorilla when a child fell into its enclosure at a zoo in Cincinnati.

“I have a shot in the exhibition of a cheetah which I came across in Kenya,” she says. “I called her ‘supermum’ because she managed to raise five cubs to adulthood. She was always very generous to us and allowed us access to her babies and allowed us to follow her at a respectful distance when she was hunting. I heard a couple of years ago that she had died protecting her cubs and having been that close to her and admired her that much, that really, really upset me.

“Also, I made a film for the Mara Lion Project where we followed a young lioness being collared and she was poisoned. It turned out every single member of her pride was killed by one person putting out poison. I was in bits when that happened.”

Trai takes heart from the fact that, through her films, she is helping to get the message across that animals are worth more alive than dead, and is thereby contributing to the demise of such needless killing. She accepts that, in many cultures, animals are still hunted for survival and doesn’t object to this. What bothers her is mindless destruction by self-seeking glory chasers.

“What I have a problem with specifically is people who go and pay thousands or even tens of thousands of pounds to go into Africa and shoot an endangered animal for selfish reasons, like the American dentist who shot Cecil the lion,” says Trai. “I googled ‘trophy room’ and the images of people sitting there with carcases all around them, looking smug and self-satisfied, made me sick.”

For Trai, it’s simple – it’s a privilege to be granted access to some of the world’s most fascinating creatures and this is something she doesn’t take for granted. “For me, when I’m close to an animal, there’s something so wonderful and humbling about looking it in the eye and it accepting you being there,” she says. “In the case of the gorillas, with all their intelligence and their emotion, to even think about killing them would be so abhorrent.”

• There are a few remaining places on Trai’s forthcoming trips to Rwanda and South Africa. For more information, visit www.enlightenedmedia.net/photosafaris

Trai Anfield: The Trophy Room Wildlife Photographs is at St Mary’s Inn, Morpeth, until October 2.