This week’s issue features William Finnegan’s piece about a Manhattan night-life baron’s race to save the world’s rarest species of tortoise: the angonoka, or plowshare tortoise, which is coveted by collectors on the illegal market. We sent the South Africa-based photographer Jonathan Torgovnik to Madagascar, home of the last remaining habitat for these animals, to capture that night-life baron, Eric Goode, in the field with the tortoises he has committed himself to protect.
The portrait that opens the piece, of Goode with a tortoise, just barely came together. “Everything was planned to the minute, and so many things could have gone wrong,” Torgovnik told me from Rwanda, where he was onto his next assignment. “The whole time, there was this cyclone hovering over the Indian Ocean, pouring mega-rain on Madagascar.” As luck had it, there was a single, momentary break in the rain when “the light was just beautiful,” he said. Things kept falling into place: his flight to Mahajanga, near the national park in Ampijoroa, took off despite the cyclone; his driver took an unusual route to the airport that happened to pass just in front of the Baobob restaurant and port that Finnegan writes about in the lead of his piece; the armed guards at the sanctuary were there at a time when they normally wouldn’t have been.
“The whole experience was surreal,” Torgovnik said. “To travel to the other side of the world to go and look for this rare tortoise… I’m in Madagascar, having a beer at the end of the day, and these lemurs are jumping overhead. It was just incredible.”
All photographs by Jonathan Torgovnik/Reportage by Getty.
