“YOU don’t take a photograph. You ask, quietly, to borrow it,” an unknown author once said. The comment I’m going to open with is probably not a fair one, because it ignores the skills of wildlife photographers (who are regarded by some as “primarily technicians”), nevertheless I’m going to write it and be damned.
Wildlife photography is – what my former sensei used to say about the nature of martial arts training – a lot about showing up. The implication is that all you have to do is arrive and the rest will take care of itself. When you look at the sheer beauty and drama of successful wildlife photography, it’s as if nature herself took the photograph, for that’s how powerful the images suggest she is. It’s what landscape photographer Ansel Adams said. “Sometimes I do get to places just when God’s ready to have somebody click the shutter.” There is another codicil to this equation.
You have to be present at the right time when all the elements conspire to achieve that seminal shot.
A moment in a million. Some wildlife photographers have waited 17 years for a Zen-like defining moment, often returning again and again to the same site to achieve it. Wildlife photography is unlike other photography.
It isn’t about approaching ordinary things in such a way that they become extraordinary, rather it is about the extraordinary right from the start. The genre is defined as documenting various forms of wildlife in their natural habitat.
Over a century ago National Geographic first published the wildlife photographs of George Shiras, a wildlife photographer at a time when technology was in its infancy. The technology of current wildlife photography, which includes improved dynamic range, higher ISO thresholds of state-of-the-art digital sensors, remote controlled or beam-triggered shutter-release mechanisms, to mention a few, has made the previously impossible eminently possible.
And with this comes higher expectations not always creatively met. As internationally acclaimed wildlife photographer (director and one of the judges of Natures Best Photography competition) Lou Coetzer points out, the genre is no longer cut and dried.
Coetzer believes that “technical perfection, superb lighting and storytelling through action and interaction and behaviour”, are the elements that constitute a great wildlife photograph and points out the genre is conflicted as to whether it is purely documentary, or embraces fine art.
Originating in the US, this is the 20th anniversary of Nature’s Best Photography. This year’s overall winner is South African Brian Joffe. Joffe has been passionate about photographs from childhood. His quest is “to master the combinations of light and composition while creating photographic images that will satisfy a multitude of different tastes in the world of visual poetry and art”.
Which it does, with a body of photographs ranging from a Malachite kingfisher with an upturned spider in its beak, to a grinning surfing crocodile.
At the beginning of the year the museum hosted the NHU Africa’s 50th annual edition of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Exhibition. Those wildlife photographs took the form of backlit specialized transparency prints, or a high-end light box upping the intensity. Nature’s Best returns to the standard fare of the print behind glass.
As mentioned, the immediacy of photography makes it one of the most effective media to express Africa’s remarkable biodiversity, “encouraging greater public interest in conservation”, as showcased in this exhibition through various categories, including reptiles, mammals, birds, wild cats, landscapes, culture and two youth sections. And yes, it is a very effective medium.
Although it would not be fair to say that all the images exhibited are of nature as “red in tooth and claw”, there seems to be a strong tendency (as is common in much of wildlife photography) towards a diet of the drama of the kill, or at least a stand-off, an approach strongly present in the winning shots. Take for example Hannes Lochner’s winning shot of a balletic extension of an impala’s leg in the chops of a hippo, the winner-of Wildcats, Karin van Couwenberg’s photograph showing the whitened eye of an anguished buffalo as it knows it's going down, a fight between two raptors by Christopher Jobic and Willem Kruger, or the elegant curve of two buck as they narrowly escape the snapping jaw of a crocodile by Peter Farmer.
Which brings me to an interesting criticism by two wildlife film-makers and environmentalists – Chris Palmer and Doug Peacock, one which could equally apply to wildlife photography. In his book Shooting in the Wild: An Insider's Account of Making Movies in the Animal Kingdom Palmer, raises the concern that, “people who consume a heavy diet of wildlife films filled with staged violence and aggression, for example, are likely to think about nature as a circus or a freak show. They certainly won’t form the same positive connections to the natural world as people who watch more thoughtful, authentic, and conservation-oriented films”.
Likewise in Grizzly Years: In Search of the American Wilderness, Peacock warns of “the dangerous temptation of wildlife films is that they can lull us into thinking we can get by without the original models – that we might not need animals in the flesh”. Leading him to proclaim, “I have spent too much time with my eye glued to the viewfinder and ended up missing both the image of the mind and that on film”.
This brings me to another concern. While one cannot deny the beauty of these images, the singularity of the moment captured, or the photographer’s technical skill there’s a problem. It doesn’t lie with the photographer, but rather in an oversaturation of peak moments by the media, resulting in a jaded response by the viewer.
It seems our jaded palette cannot settle for the exceptional. Like addicts our pictorial expectations get higher and higher and the extraordinary takes on the feel of the ordinary.
Catch the exhibition before it leaves for The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.
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