NBA Stars Gone Wild

The National Basketball Association's biggest stars partnered with WildAid to fight the illegal trade of rhino horns and elephant ivory. In this video we see Joakim Noah and Pau Gasol of the Chicago Bulls, Thabo Sefolosha and Al Horford of the Atlanta Hawks, Serge Ibaka of the Oklahoma City Thunder, and Tyson Chandler of the Dallas Mavericks stand against poaching. The athletes use photographer Nick Brandt’s stunning imagery to hammer the point home like a tomahawk dunk.

When Brandt began capturing images in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park in 2001, he primarily paid homage to the stately animals that live there. But when he realized that the creatures were being slaughtered at an astonishing rate, his imagery, once so flattering that it verged on idolatry, slid toward the macabre. Regal portraits of lions and rhinos and elephant families gave way to an eerie oeuvre of bleached skulls, taxidermy, and calcified birds. He also created a nonprofit that employs hundreds of anti-poaching rangers, blurring the line between activism and art. Click here to see a slide show of his work and to read an interview he did with Sierra magazine.

Remember: when the buying stops, the killing can too.