Photographer’s 9-Month Investigation Uncovers the Hidden Hurt of the Fishing Industry

Photographer Nicole Tung makes use of her digital camera to show highly effective, vital tales from the hidden world of Southeast Asia’s fishing business, shining a light-weight on the business’s human and environmental prices.

Nicole Tung, a contract photojournalist born in Hong Kong and primarily based between assignments worldwide, has constructed a profession on documenting a few of the most pressing and tough tales of our time. Her work, usually centered on battle and humanitarian crises, has appeared in main worldwide publications and supported NGOs on the bottom.

This 12 months, she was named the laureate of the 15th Carmignac Photojournalism Award, an honor that marks each a brand new chapter in her profession and a shift in focus to the intersection of human rights and environmental decline.

In collaboration with the Fondation Carmignac group, Nicole Tung shared insights into this award-winning mission with PetaPixel.

About the Carmignac Photojournalism Award

Created in 2009, the Carmignac Photojournalism Award funds the manufacturing of long-term investigative initiatives that make clear underreported points worldwide. Each 12 months, the Foundation selects a geographic area and theme, providing laureates not solely monetary assist but in addition editorial freedom and logistical help. Unlike many different awards, the Carmignac Award will not be given for accomplished initiatives. Instead, it’s particularly designed to allow journalists to hold out new work. For safety causes, the laureate is formally introduced solely as soon as the reporting has been accomplished.

Tung’s mission on unlawful fishing and labor abuses in Southeast Asia was made attainable via this assist. The award allowed her to spend 9 months within the discipline throughout Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia, documenting a hidden business the place ecological devastation and human exploitation usually stay out of public sight.

A New Direction

For Tung, the popularity additionally represented a significant departure from her typical deal with battle zones, the place her work has usually centered on documenting the toll of warfare and displacement. Shifting to an environmental story meant not solely participating with a brand new material but in addition rethinking her visible and narrative method.

“I am extremely honored, and what it represents for my work is something quite different in the sense that it is not about conflict. It opened up a whole different set of challenges for me because I had to think differently about how to approach the subject of overfishing, to visualize its impact on the environment, and to understand the cost on human lives of the food we consume,” Tung says.

This shift required her to decelerate, immerse herself in communities, and develop belief with these whose tales are sometimes invisible to the surface world. Instead of the immediacy of frontline reporting, the mission required persistence, long-term statement, and an intensive examination of systemic points reasonably than sudden occasions. For Tung, the award supplied the area and assist to develop her storytelling apply, making use of the identical empathy and rigor she has dropped at battle protection to the pressing questions of environmental justice and human rights at sea.

Investigating an Opaque Industry

Her reporting took her to Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia, three international locations on the coronary heart of worldwide fishing provide chains and concurrently among the many most affected by unlawful practices. Industrial-scale fishing, she discovered, not solely depletes fish shares and threatens biodiversity but in addition relies on exploitative labor practices that usually stay invisible to shoppers.

“It was meeting with fishermen who had been recruited to work on Chinese vessels, and hearing the stories of the abuse they witnessed and endured, that stayed with me. It made me realize that we accept these invisible costs of the seafood we eat at our peril, precisely because they remain hidden from public view,” Tung remembers.

Access to the business is notoriously restricted, particularly at sea, the place operations are shielded from oversight. Tung approached the topic by tracing the interconnections between environmental destruction, pressured labor, and geopolitics. Her images doc each the human toll on migrant laborers and the ecological collapse pushed by damaging fishing strategies.

Balancing Human and Environmental Stories

For Tung, separating environmental degradation from human rights abuses is unattainable, as the 2 crises are intertwined at each stage of the fishing business. The depletion of marine life isn’t just an ecological subject but in addition a human one, with exploitation and abuse woven into the identical system that strips the seas of their assets.

“Industrial scale fishing is contributing to the rapid decline of fish stocks because of the sheer volume it removes from the sea without sustainable methods to allow fish to replenish. What drives that, however, is the exploitation of labor. Vessels are under pressure to catch as much as possible in the shortest time, and it is not profitable for them to pay people fairly or treat them with dignity,” Tung says.

Her reporting displays this inseparability, spanning a number of sides of the business that collectively kind a fancy and sometimes opaque community. In the Philippines, she examined the tuna commerce, a cornerstone of the worldwide seafood financial system, the place the trail from small coastal canneries to worldwide markets reveals the issue in tracing the origins of what finally ends up on plates world wide. In Indonesia, she investigated the shark business, the place meat is bought regionally however fins and bones are exported for cosmetics and conventional drugs, highlighting how world demand fuels native exploitation. Across the area, she documented the working circumstances of crews, a lot of whom are migrant laborers trapped in cycles of debt, withheld wages, and, at occasions, violence aboard vessels working removed from oversight.

Each layer of her reporting provides to a broader image of provide chains which can be huge, transnational, and largely untraceable to shoppers. By weaving collectively environmental loss with human struggling, Tung underscores how the seafood business’s hidden prices are borne each by the oceans and the individuals who work inside them.

The Role of Photojournalism

Tung believes that photographs can act as reminders of ongoing points even when the information will not be new. Overfishing, unlawful and unreported practices, and abuses at sea have been documented for years, however she argues that pictures can play an important function in protecting stress on governments and firms to vary.

“Reminders of these abuses can be important and powerful. Though some countries have made improvements, there is still a long way to go. I hope these images can serve as a reminder of the lengths to which governments and commercial companies still need to improve,” she says.

Looking Forward

Though she has spent years working in warfare zones, Nicole Tung says she hopes to proceed pursuing tales that deal with local weather change, environmental justice, and the human value of ecological collapse. The Carmignac-supported project, she feels, has solely scratched the floor of what stays to be uncovered.

“I hope I can continue this project in some capacity at some point. There is so much more to explore in this dark and opaque industry that far too often disregards the fact that the catch in the sea is not infinite,” Tung says.

As Southeast Asia’s waters develop ever extra contested, the stability between human livelihoods and ecological survival turns into more and more pressing. For Nicole Tung, pictures will not be solely about bearing witness however about making certain that the hidden prices of on a regular basis consumption are introduced into public view.

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Image credit: Nicole Tung, Carmignac Photojournalism Award, Chris McGrath