Jay Ullal and his life on the planet of the apes

After photographing human suffering in conflict zones, Jay Ullal is now focusing on wildlife

MUMBAI: If you ask photographer Jay Ullal, author of a recent book on the Orangutans of Borneo, about his most memorable moment with the primates, he invariably refers to the story of Uce.

On one of his many trips to the Borneo rainforest, while shooting for the book, Ullal came across a female ape that had been rescued and then released into a private sanctuary in Kalimantan. Uce, as she was nicknamed, roams the forests, but often comes back to visit her rescuer, conservationist and collaborator on Ullal's book, Willie Smits. On one such visit, Ullal shot a few Polaroids of Uce and then handed them to her. “I was amazed at her reaction,” says Ullal, still overwhelmed by the experience.

“As the prints developed, I could see the wonder on her face. She looked at the photos for a long time, and then turned around to playfully show it to her baby. Her reactions were so human.”

No amount of cajoling could get the photos back, but before she ran off, Uce went up to the security guard and tucked them into his pocket. “I hear she often comes back to see the pictures,” says Ullal. “She shows up at the camp and heads straight for the guard's pocket. They've even laminated the photographs so they don't get ruined with all the handling.”

In case readers think this is simply Ullal's anthropomorphic notions running wild, he's dedicated a short series in the book — due out in India in March — to this episode: Uce holding the photos (remarkably, the right side up), peering at them, and then holding them out to her baby.

It was enough to make a convert of Ullal, an award-winning photojournalist who has covered every possible war and trouble-torn area on the planet, from the Bangladesh War of 1972 to Bosnia, Iraq, Lebanon, Rwanda and many others. His close shaves and dogged determination to return to the scene of strife, made colleagues at the German magazine Stern dub him “the man with seven lives”. He has been attacked so many times in different parts of the world, and had so many near-misses that his wife Rajni says it's a miracle he's still alive. But in October 1998, after more than three decades of chasing wars, Ullal, now 74, finally hung up his Canon D1. Though not for long.

“I decided I wanted to shoot other kinds of pictures,” he says. And that's when wildlife “just happened” to him. Shortly before he retired that year, Ullal was deputed to cover several wildlife stories for Stern: A cover on the Royal Bengal Tiger and another on elephant culling in Zimbabwe. It was only after his third wildlife assignment on the Borneo Orangs that a publisher friend put the idea of a book into Ullal's head.

Many trips to the Indonesian island (to document the apes during the different seasons) and more than 20,000 shots later, the book is finally out in Germany. In India it will hit the shelves next month, tentative titled The Thinker of the Jungle — a reference to the benign, almost contemplative manner of the Orangs and their amazing ability to sit and observe things for hours.

But the book is anything but a warm and fuzzy coffee-table study on the moods and manners of Orangs, with its tight close-ups and doublespreads (though it has some of that too). Ullal says he's no conservationist, but his book quietly makes the point about poaching and some fairly outrageous customs — killing female apes to sell the babies, serving up severed Orang heads as a dinner delicacy, or trying to humanise them by keeping them as house pets and trying to teach them to play piano — through photographs and other graphics, like satellite images of a shrinking habitat.
 
“When I shot wars, I never photographed the dead,” says Ullal. “I always tried to capture human suffering; men, women and children who were in peril or in pain. Now that I have moved on to wildlife, I want to document suffering among animals. It's the least I can do.”
 
Ullal needn't worry on that count; as readers will soon discover, each of his 327 pictures speaks more than a thousand words, sending out exactly the message he wants.

g_labonita@dnaindia.net