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Go Toward the Pain
Relentless photojournalist and animal advocate Jo-Anne McArthur shares what she’s learned about fostering positive change while maintaining emotional wellbeing
Jo-Anne McArthur has devoted much of her life photographing the exploitation of animals, bearing witness on the front lines of suffering. She has spent weeks and months on meat, fur and bear bile farms, at rodeos, animal markets and marine parks, documenting the lives of animals exploited for food, fashion, entertainment and experimentation.
This energy has manifested in a sprawling body of work, from the feature-length documentary The Ghosts in Our Machine to three books: We Animals, Captive, and the forthcoming HIDDEN: Animals in the Anthropocene. Her photography and writing has been featured in publications such as National Geographic, The Washington Post, and The Guardian, as well as by hundreds of organizations, publishers and academics. She speaks around the world at universities and conferences about her photography, activism, and the human-animal relationship.
McArthur’s most ambitious endeavor to date is the We Animals Archive, an ever-growing collection containing thousands of images and videos of animal industries around the world. The material brings together her own work with that from a network of global contributors, and functions as a free and accessible resource for media, educators, organizations, policy-makers, and influencers who can help amplify its reach. A stream of new photo essays and videos, including this recent documentary about the activism of George Monbiot by filmmaker Alex Lockwood, are published at We Animals Media.
I spoke to Jo-Anne about how she copes with the multitude of trauma she’s witnessed, and how these tools might help others suffering under the emotional weight of the massive animal industrial complex.
Tenderly: You’ve chosen to bear witness to a level of suffering that nearly all others look away from. How have you dealt with this, psychologically?
