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World Press Photo Foundation
1. Distressed residents of the village of Ooty, near the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve, in Tamil Nadu, India, gather during an operation to capture a tiger that had recently killed a fellow villager on 12 January 2014.
2. The track running out of the village of Kutvanda, a high human-animal conflict zone in the Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve, in Maharashtra, India on 12 October 2015.
From ‘Boundaries: Human-Tiger Conflict’ by Senthil Kumaran (@senthilphotography), awarded in the Long-Term Projects category of the #WPPh2022 Contest.
The 2022 global jury said this about the project: “The visual language of loose, blurry frames conveys movement and the urgency of survival for both humans and tigers in the wake of regional environmental change.”
In India, Bengal tigers (Panthera tigris tigris) are considered endangered, with up to 3,000 surviving in the wild. Human settlement, cultivation, and urban development are encroaching on tigers’ natural habitat and reducing their prey base. Villages on the perimeters of tiger sanctuaries and reserves are often home to Indigenous communities, who depend on livestock, farming, or the forest for their livelihoods. Conflict arises when tigers kill livestock and occasionally humans, which although rare, usually occurs when angry groups surround tigers who have entered settlements.
Senthil Kumaran is a documentary photographer and @natgeo explorer from Madurai, South India. He has been working with conservationists, forest officials, and local villagers for the past ten years, to understand and document the various dimensions of human-tiger conflict. Follow the link in our bio to discover his work.
