Who Killed the Gorillas of Virunga?

In the July/August issue of American Photo, we named Getty photographer Brett Stirton’s picture of a murdered silverback gorilla the “Photo of the Year.” Now there’s more to report about the image and its impact. In its July issue, National Geographic has an intriguing, absorbing feature tracing how Stirton and a writer returned to the scene of the crime, Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to find out who killed the gorillas. The answers the pair came up with are shocking and disturbing. It’s a must-read. The National Geographic TV channel will also air a documentary on about the story on July 1.

The Geographic piece is a brief tour through a land of political instability and guerilla warfare. But the murderers of the gorillas, says writer Mark Jenkins, were fighting over something very ordinary: charcoal. In its own tragic way, the piece outlines the how the need for simple fuel can set in motion a chain of events leading to an ecological distaster.
       Stirton made his original pictures in 2007, when he accompanied a group of rangers into the Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The rangers were retrieving the bodies of six gorillas that had been murdered—the culprits remained unknown at the time. Stirton’s most memorable image showed one of the gorillas being carried out on a makeshift stretcher by 16 men.  In our story about the picture, contributing editor Eliane Laffont wrote that the photo was a visual symbol—“a modern-day King Kong brought low by the cruelty of man.”
     Since then he has done interviews about his story with NPR, received an award from the Overseas Press Club, and his pictures have been featured at Rome’s Festival of Photography. Here is a true case of photographs changing the way people think.—David Schonauer