English Publication Date: APRIL 2025
In the collective imagination, the African continent remains a wilderness paradise. This image has been constructed as much by the accounts of ethologists (Dian Fossey, Jane Goodall) as by cinematographic successes (Out of Africa, Atari) that have captured the splendor of the landscapes and the richness of an exceptional natural heritage. Above all, it is a universal memory built on clichés.
What remains of this paradise today? How does the continent’s economic expansion coexist with the need to preserve this incomparable capital? How are the tensions between the desire to embrace modernity and the need to conserve wildlife expressed? How can we reconcile the population explosion of the continent’s sprawling cities with the integrity of the territories that are home to indigenous peoples and wild animals? How can we show this tension between an imaginary world rooted in the past and a reality that is catching up with us?
Paradise Inc. is, in three chapters, a passionate and exciting photographic investigation that takes us deep into the heart of these fundamental questions.
Born in Africa and raised on the continent, documentary photographer Guillaume Bonn offers with this work a new and rare perspective on what is really happening in Africa, far from the expected clichés and ready-made solutions.
« As a working documentary photographer over the past three decades, in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa, Guillaume has been a first-hand witness to its enduring glories and its ongoing traumas that range from its extraordinary range of human and wildlife diversity to its wars and famines and atrocious poverty. For better or worse, this is the Africa that has become his inescapable muse, a place that compels him and repels him, a bond that he describes as "le mal d’ Afrique». —
THE BOOK
Size 21 x 27 cm
Case bound book, rounded spine
184 pages printed on Munken Print White 115g main de 1.8
100 photographs
Price : 35£/39€/$45
English Publication Date: April 2025
French Edition Publication Date : November 2024
« Paradise Inc. is the culmination of a twenty-year effort to document the final days of the great East African wilderness. It is the result of numerous expeditions into the African bush, during which I visited nearly every country on the continent. As a Frenchman with Malagasy heritage, born in Madagascar and raised in Kenya, I have witnessed firsthand the dramatic changes reshaping the continent over the past three decades through my work as a documentary photographer. The purpose of all these trips was to explore the remaining wildernesses of eastern Africa which has been my home for a long time, and to observe and document the efforts of those people who are trying to preserve them. »
« This is a book I have been waiting to read, and the author is the person I have been longing to talk to. Guillaume, you raise very pertinent issues that are not new to the world but rather have been ignored by the world. »
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ABOUT PARADISE INC.
In 2021, Guillaume Bonn is one the photographers involved in the project Africa State of Mind: Contemporary Photography Reimagines a Continent, published by Thames & Hudson.
‘Paradise Inc.’ is the continuation of this work, presented in its large dimension. Actually, the photographer explores the idea of ‘Africanness’ —a psychological space as much as a physical territory, a state of mind as much as a geographical place— since a very long time, as he was born and raised in Africa.
‘Paradise Inc.’ is his love declaration to Africa and the expression of the fear that, maybe, it could disappear. Nostalgic for an Africa where the presence of man was not yet completely detrimental to the wild world and a flamboyant Nature, Guillaume Bonn offers with this long-term work a completely expressive vision of the paradox – of schizophrenia? — of all those who hope that the continent can retain its beauty while looking to the future.
ABOUT GUILLAUME BONN
Guillaume Bonn is an award winning documentary photographer who has for the last 25 years reported on conflict, social and environment issues.
He was a contributor to The New York Times and worked at Vanity Fair magazine for 15 years, covering a variety of topics ranging from the conflict in Northern Uganda, the Darfur humanitarian crisis and the ivory trade on the African elephants. His reportings has brought him to fourty countries on the continent.
However, while we all, in some way or another, tell stories, the type Bonn is compelled to tell is the kind ‘the world’, as he says, ‘is turning away from’ —be that helping break the Darfur crisis in the New York Times, exposing the sexual abuse suffered by children in the DRC at the hands of UN peacekeepers, or risking his life to uncover the machinations of Africa’s trade in ivory.
Be they urgent or quiet, Guillaume Bonn tells stories the world is afraid to hear. They pose real questions and as such demand real answers. New Yorker writer Jon Lee Anderson describes him ‘‘like an archeologist, who has the urge to seek out and preserve whatever amounts to a legacy of the past in East Africa. The difference is that he takes pictures, and that the past he seeks to record is quite a recent one.’’ Guillaume Bonn loves this Africa, urgently, thoughtfully, and unflinchingly. It sits in or behind or in front of every photograph he takes, images of unrelenting care, of the human and its environment, of a life demanding immediate change.
Guillaume Bonn has also directed a number of documentaries, including ‘Peter Beard: Scrapbooks from Africa and Beyond’ produced by French TV Canal+, which was screened at the Sundance Film Festival and shown on TV channels worldwide. He worked as a cameraman on the film documentary ‘Dying to Tell the Story’, nominated for an Emmy Award.
Guillaume is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and is currently working on his 6th book based on his essay “The Analogue Mind: The Death and Reimagining of Photography”. He advises organisations pursuing wildlife and environmental agenda.
