The photograph's a record of what's been

happening in front of me.

It's not something I've constructed.

If I'm able to give a voice for that situation, then I've

achieved my objective.

And that's really important to me as an individual, but also

as a photographer.

I love Bangkok for exactly the same reasons I hate it.

I love it for its noise.

I love it for its intensity, sweatiness.

And there's always some treasure troves in Bangkok.

And for all those reasons, it just drives me bonkers

sometimes, and I have to leave.

But every place in the world must drive people crazy and

happy at the same time.

My name is Patrick Brown.

I'm a photographer.

I've been based in Thailand for the last 12 years.

And this is home for me for the while.

[SPEAKING THAI]

PATRICK BROWN: I've traveled all my live,

since I was about five.

Originally from England, from Sheffield.

Grew up in the Middle East.

I spent some time in South Africa.

And I spent some time in Canada.

And finally, the family settled in

Australia when I was 13.

I'm still doing what I did when I was a young boy.

I'm still travelling, still meeting interesting people.

I think photography for me was the best visa I've never had

in my life.

I've been with racing car drivers

I've been with homeless.

I've been with drug addicts.

I've been with politicians.

I've been with royalty.

It's one of the best vehicles to move in and out of

societies that normally you wouldn't be able to navigate

your way through.

That's my car that I rebuilt when I was 18, modeled on an

old English car.

Took me about three months to rebuild it, maybe even a bit

longer, actually.

I'm trained as a tool-maker, which is somebody that makes

machines and stuff.

I really enjoy working with my hands.

And I like the craft of photography, not just taking

the photograph or the equipment, but actually I like

to produce a photograph.

I like to go in the darkroom.

I find the darkroom very therapeutic, just dodging

between the light and making a photograph

darker or lighter here.

And it's hand-printed.

You can never make another print exactly the same.

And I find that really adorable.

I was incredibly naive about what documentary

photography could do.

I was working in a multi-story carpark.

And I saw a little snippet about this guy

in the local rag.

And he was in Africa, where he was the only surgeon for 2 and

1/2 million people.

So I sold my car and my surfboard and went over there

and documented him.

And I was there for six weeks.

Six weeks was all I could get off for work.

And I came back to Australia, had an exhibition.

It raised a lot of money for--

his name is Robert Weeden.

We made awareness for him in Australia.

And then it was published in Australia.

And it won a couple of awards.

It was one of the pivotal points when I realized you

could actually make a difference with a photograph.

And it wasn't until about '96, '98 that I made a decision I

could actually make money from this.

And then started to do more and more work with magazines

in Australia.

This is all animal trade, by the way, full of animal stuff.

As you can see, everything's under alphabetical order.

Only I know where to find it.

A colleague convinced me, just get out of

Australia and come to Asia.

Have a look around.

If you don't like it, you can move on.

And then I ended up in Chiang Mai and met

some Burmese refugees.

They gave me access to places I would never be able to get

to, and opened up a whole world to me that I really

didn't know existed to the extent that it did, and that

was the Burmese border.

This is on the Thai-Burma border near [INAUDIBLE].

And then you've got actually real tiger

teeth, and tiger claws.

And these are different tiger teeth.

And they have different value where they come from.

These are used as potency, or protective elements regarding

the person that wears them.

They have amulets on them, or into key chains

and things like that.

"Trading to Extinction," I started working on it in 2002.

This is my first solo book.

And I had no idea what the animal trade was about.

For me, the animal trade was little trinkets selling in

shops at that stage.

And most of the world, I think in some way, thought the same.

Four years ago, the statistic was $52 billion annually.

That's what the animal trade is worth, which rivals some of

the biggest electronic industries.

One of my favorite statistics from this whole project is

that there's more Bengali tigers in Texas than there is

in the Bay of Bengal.

It's a huge industry.

And I would be still working on this until

probably the day I die.

So there had to be some physicality

of boundaries placed.

Southeast Asia was the spot.

And plus, I live here.

It made it quite logical.

This is patrolling in southern Cambodian in a

place called Bokor.

That was really quite an amazing trip, that one.

The first story I did was anti-poaching team in Bokor.

And this anti-poaching team, we'd go in on a night

insurgence.

And we would hunt down or trace down the poaching team.

And most of the guys in the actual anti-poaching team are

actually ex-poachers, because there's nothing better than a

poacher to catch a poacher.

He knows his routine and he knows his habits.

They're about to plan to do a night insurgence, which I have

to say is one of the scariest things to do, because you're

in total darkness.

And you can only just see the person in front of you.

And the way your eyes work, the center of your retina is

actually damaged from the amount of sun it's had.

So you have to look out of the corner of your eye.

That's the most sensitive part of your eye.

That was a pretty intense trip, that one.

This is a poacher that's been caught.

And that's his name, his age, and the crime, and where it

was, and the date, obviously.

And they did it to all the poachers that they captured.

I have quite a lot of empathy for the poachers.

A majority of the poachers are just doing what their

ancestors have done, which is hunt.

The Cambodian poachers that I went with, I think they got

$10 or $15 for each monkey--

very, very little money.

They have very, very little knowledge of where that

product's going to go.

This is pretty much all I'll be taking.

So take my four cameras, my Polaroid, the Rolleiflex and

my two Nikons, and three lenses, and my film bag.

Welcome to Guangzhou from Bangkok.

Guangzhou is close to the Hong Kong border.

It's southwest China.

And it's the economic powerhouse for this region.

It's very close to Tianjin, which is the manufacturing

powerhouse of China.

Due to the wealth of the manufacturing of Tianjin and

the money that's come in to this area, this has always

been a fruitful place for animal trafficking.

What I'm hoping to achieve is to see where we are five years

down the track.

It's a 10-year project.

So where was I halfway through this project I was

here the last time.

It's good to come back and relive it and

see where we are.

And what I'm hoping to find is that things

maybe have moved on.

I don't think the trade is in any way dwingled.

I think they've just got smarter about hiding it.

They're not as confident as the used to be.

They know these things do get out into the

world outside China.

So they're a bit more paranoid about people with cameras.

-[SPEAKING CHINESE]

PATRICK BROWN: I never ask permission.

I just get in there.

And I know I've got a very short window of opportunity to

get the pictures.

As soon as you start to ask for permission, people are not

going to be themselves.

And a few times, I push it, and I push it.

If somebody's stopping me from taking pictures, or tries to

stop me from taking pictures, I push it even further,

because there's a reason why this person is

trying to stop me.

Because he knows they're doing something wrong.

So the hardest thing in a photograph is

capturing an emotion.

So if I'm able to capture this angry person trying to stop me

from taking pictures, it also adds another little dimension

to the body of work.

We go into one pet shop which specializes in selling fish.

One fish in this particular shop, I think,

was worth about $10,000.

The people-- the owner of the shop openly talks about how he

smuggled the fish in from Australia, and smuggled them

in from the Philippines.

-[SPEAKING CHINESE]

-This is from the US.

PATRICK BROWN: US?

So that's an American fish in China.

-Yeah.

They can make sure that--

-[SPEAKING CHINESE]

-Yeah, they don't really have a legal channel to help you

ship it back to Australia.

He just confessed to me that a lot of fish are smuggled in.

PATRICK BROWN: He did?

-Yeah.

PATRICK BROWN: These guys are untouchable.

It's just not on the radar of the law enforcement offices.

It's not important enough for them.

Everything in the market isn't endangered, no.

That's where that gray zone of the wildlife trade

comfortably sits in.

And I'll use the crocodile as an example.

2 and 1/2 thousand tons of live animals go through

Heathrow a day.

You have a shipment of, say, 25, 30 crocodiles.

So the custom guys at Heathrow, he's looking for

contraband, he's looking for drugs.

But he's not a reptile expert.

So he counts 30 crocodiles, ticks that off, yeah, move on.

In that 30, there could be 10 very, very endangered

crocodiles.

Guangzhou's also very famous for its wild game restaurants.

But one of the most common things is you can go choose

your alligator, choose your crocodile.

And in this particular restaurant, it's just out

there in the open.

And it's got its snout bound.

And guests, that's the first thing the see when they walk

into the restaurant is a crocodile.

I want that crocodile to be chopped up.

And I want it for my dinner.

That's all you have to say, and it will be done.

With the animal trade, the consumption of animals, it's

more to do with you are what you eat.

So you consume a piece of the tiger, you'll inherit a part

of that tiger.

And you become more virile and stronger and you'll fight off

a cold, or you'll beat the arthritis.