Before matriculating at the University of the Arts London, Tim Flach took a foundation course to study techniques of design. His childhood had involved a lot of drawing and painting, and he spent many days sketching landscapes and natural settings. He’d never seriously tried photography as a medium until one of his course instructors told the students to go to the London Zoo to work on compositional exercises, only this time, not with a pencil or pen—with a camera.    

“So the first roll of film I took connected me to the subject of animals,” Flach said in a recent interview. The experience immediately resonated with him. “I was attracted to visual things instead of verbal,” he says. “I was always interested in the relationship between ourselves and sentient beings.” 

Flach’s remarkable, award-winning photography is an exercise in exploring such relationships. Since publishing Equus (2008), a collection dedicated to horses, he has produced a series of extraordinary photographs including Dog Gods (2010) and More Than Human (2012), all of which combine the art of portraiture with wildlife photography in ways that draw out the sameness between us and wildlife, as opposed to a sense of otherness. 

Flach’s most recent collection, Endangered (2017), takes his animal portraiture to a whole new level. Portraits of animals both iconic and exotic draw undeniable parallels between us and them, whether it be a Yunnan snub-nosed monkey striking a contemplative pose or a mother chimp rocking her baby. 

Flach is driven to draw us closer to the natural world. “Humanity's well-being, and ultimately our survival, is wrapped up in how we manage our relationship with nature,” he said. “That’s why the book was called Endangered. It wasn't just an inference to the animals and their status on the [endangered species] red list. It is also a statement about the fact that if we don't find value in the natural world, and we don’t change our current relationship to the natural world, then we don't have a future either.” 

Flach photographed the world’s last male northern white rhinocerous before it died on March 1, a photograph of which appears in Endangered. A brutal civil war in Sudan contributed to wiping out the species, and Flach went to Sudan to document the rhino knowing it may very well be the last time it could be photographed.  

“Going there to witness that, there was this sense of, how did it come to this that I have to be here to photograph the last male white rhino?” he said. “The fact that I was there photographing it was just a representation of the fact that we had come to this awful point.”

Flach points out that the story is just one of many others that don’t get the same amount of press attention, which is why he strives to photograph as many broad and diverse species as possible in his work. “There are many species that disappear into oblivion without us being mindful of it because they are not sexy, or it’s a small bug or something,” he said. “Ecologically they could be really important, but they are probably not cute or fearsome, or they don’t have an iconic-ness about them.” 

Flach has a remarkable facility of capturing precise movements with the camera in such a way that the tiniest detail, such as the filigree of a hair on a panda’s head or the stippled green skin on a lemur leaf frog’s face, jumps off the page. In one photograph, a Bengal tiger shakes off water after getting wet, the gyrating rivulets of water like splash-paint spraying off its head.

It’s all part of his overall effort to bring us and these animals closer together.

“When you have a tiger shaking, it brings you back to maybe a golden retriever shaking off water after it’s gone into a pond or something,” he said. “The idea is that it’s a familiar action, but you don’t necessarily connect it with a big cat. A lot of my images are about those kinds of threads linking us back emotionally to things that feel familiar but are different.”

While the animals are often heart-warming in Flach’s photos, the stories behind them are dark. Many of the photographs are of animals that have suffered from climate disruption and human exploitation, such as in the case of the ploughshare tortoise. Only some 100 are left in the wild. In order to prevent poachers from seeking them out to sell them as exotic pets, a nursery protecting the species has been forced to engrave their shells with numbers so they will be less desirable. 

In other photographs, entire scenes can be found hidden amid the finer aspects of the image, as with Flach’s photograph of Djala, a western lowland gorilla, photographed at an English sanctuary run by the Aspinall Foundation. In an extraordinarily intimate photo of Djala lifting water to his mouth, the horizon line is reflected in the water on his fingers, with trees and animals shimmering on its surface like a reflecting pool. 

Flach mainly uses a Hasselblad camera to get his shots, but for Endangered, he needed longer lenses and often used a Canon 5DS 50 megapixel, which helped him speed up the ISO in ways he couldn’t do five years earlier. 

Flach says that, above all, he is exploring the ways in which certain types of images resonate the most powerfully, which is why he employs the art of human portraiture in his wildlife photography. “A lot of my work concentrates on the portraiture, because our tendency is to shape portraits of animals as human faces, so we tend to then find a sense of emotional connection. You need emotion, you need empathy, if you want to create desired change. We can know something, but it’s not until it touches our hearts do we actually want to take action.”