Mital Patel spent years photographing the two remaining northern white rhinos on Earth. Yet his work isn’t just about animals; it tells us a lot about humans, too

Here’s a fact that should shock you: there are, at the time of writing, only two northern white rhinos left alive anywhere on the planet. That’s right, just two.

Fatu and Najin, mother and daughter, live under permanent protection at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya – and neither can ever be returned to the wild. Both were born into captivity and their species is basically extinct, outside a fenced enclosure watched round the clock by armed rangers.

It’s the kind of emotive subject that countless photographers would relish. But it’s also a topic that could easily tip into cliché: all sorrow, symbolism and empty hand-wringing.

Thankfully, photographer Mital Patel has taken a refreshingly different route – as his online exhibition The Caretakers, running on All About Photo this month, demonstrates. Rather than making Fatu and Najin the entire story, Patel points his camera just as often at the humans who spend their lives beside them.

A ranger laughing with his arm braced against a rhino’s flank. A four-man foot patrol – one carrying a rifle, another a leash and a tracking dog – walking out across dry grassland toward two grazing shapes on the horizon.

A man standing beside a stone memorial reading “Sudan, the last male northern white rhino, 1973 to 2018,” his hand resting on it the way you’d touch a friend’s headstone.

This is not just an extinction story. It’s a story about the unglamorous labor of keeping something incredibly special alive, day in, day out.

Technical approach

From a technical point of view, what’s striking is how Patel gets you close enough to share that experience.

Some of the strongest images use an extreme wide-angle lens pushed right up against a rhino’s face; close enough that the horn distorts and looms into the foreground while the animal’s herd carries on grazing, unbothered, in the background.

It’s a technique that only works with animals used to human presence. And it does something that a longer lens never could: it collapses the safe distance a telephoto gives you and puts the viewer intimately inside the frame.

This contrasts nicely with the more conventional side-on portraits – rhino and ranger sharing the same patch of golden light, shot on what looks like a standard portrait length.

Switching registers between reportage and something closer to formal portraiture gives the series as a whole a sense of verve and dynamism.

Meanwhile the image above, used on the show’s poster, sums up the story in a single frame. Two rhinos graze at the edges of the picture, a ranger standing in the empty middle distance, dwarfed by the animals on either side.

It’s a picture that could be titled either ‘Guardianship’ or ‘Futility’, depending on how you feel about the odds.

Conservation photography typically asks you to mourn for a species. This one asks you to also think about the people who show up for it.