Cape Town - Through the lens of his camera, Capetonian Chris Fallows has captured Africa’s animals and habitats in all their magnificence, only to watch them be chased to the brink of extinction through poaching and climate change within a few short years.
The message of his work is urgent: if we don’t change our ways, these species in all their glory will be lost forever.
“My aim is to profoundly touch my audience in a way that connects them with my subject matter through a range of emotions – from guilt and sadness for what we have lost, to awe and respect for what is left,” Fallows said.
His most iconic image is now a time capsule of a creature and behaviour that may never again be seen off the shores of the Cape: a massive great white shark flying into the air as it breached in False Bay.
“We had 100 000 tourists come to SA to see that behaviour every year, and now it doesn’t exist,” Fallows said. The Great Whites that he spent years photographing have all disappeared thanks to overfishing in False Bay and Gansbaai, and their unique breaching behaviour has vanished from our coastline.
“I was privileged to be the person to discover it in the mid-1990s. Now less than a quarter century later, that behaviour no longer exists. It’s a wake-up call to how quickly the natural world is changing around us.”
This week, Fallows was honoured with an international award for his work. He beat 1 000 other artists in all genres from oil painting to watercolour to win the Global Eye Award 2020 at the Saatchi Art Fair in London.
His “Eleventh Hour” exhibition showcased 11 black and white images of animals threatened or near extinct, with the 12th image of an elephant and a fig tree in full colour to represent hope for the future.
“It’s an embodiment of hope that if we change our ways, these things can still be seen,” he said.
The awarding organisation, STARTnet, said of his work: “South African-
born Chris Fallows’ work represents authenticity, intimacy and emotion. The engaging manner in which he photographs his wild subjects bears testimony to the decades he has spent in some of the world’s remotest regions uniquely working in all three realms of ocean, air and earth.”
The awe-inspiring images take extreme patience and dedication to capture.
“When I say it takes years to capture a second, that’s not a lie,” Fallows said. “I’ve spent more than 3 000 days at sea working with great white sharks, and well over 1 000 days in the bush.”
But it was seven-tenths of a second on a boat bobbing near Seal Island in False Bay in 2001, that would change his career forever. Fallows had his eye pressed to a tiny viewfinder on a film camera when he witnessed the split-second shark flight that would become his most iconic work.
“I knew it was an absolutely incredible breach and was truly exceptional,” he said. “In all our years at sea we’ve never seen anything quite like that.”
He took the film in to be developed at a lab in Cape Town on a Friday afternoon, and begged the technicians to take extra care.
For more, visit chrisfallows.com or follow @chrisfallowsphotography on Instagram.