Daisy Walker got her start capturing fashion shoots, tucked away in studios under artificial lights, with rails of clothing and piles of make-up just out of shot, or otherwise jostling for space in busy backstage areas during London Fashion Week. In recent years, however, the photographer has been drawn away from the fashion world and lured into the great outdoors, as evidenced by her first ever book, Guardians & Carers of the Natural World.
Reluctant to put out a proper monograph, Walker was instead intent on giving the world something of ‘intrinsic value’. “The book is a series of love letters from people who live at one with their planet, in the hope that their love and care for it will seep into us,” she explains. “Those of us in cities are living lives so divorced from nature that our environment feels far away – an unseen concern we can easily put aside when making daily decisions that could impact it. I hope the book will conjure a yearning to connect and honour the natural world and a path forward.”
Ahead of compiling her debut book, Walker spent almost two years researching people who had given over their lives in the pursuit of protecting the planet. A lot of them had done the 9-5 corporate job in the city for a time, before turning their back on urban life and returning to nature and a different calling.
“I spoke for hours on Zoom with people all over the world, living a life so very different from my own, and yet completely aligned with how I saw our role in our relationship with nature – as caregivers and custodians for a land we are reliant upon,” she says. “I was struck by how many people I spoke to felt the same yearnings I have for trees, for soil, for wide open spaces, and living amongst wild things.” It’s likely a familiar feeling for many of us: who can say they have not, maybe on a particularly dreary, grey Monday morning, they haven’t longed to escape to the country to live a quiet, simple life?
Across Guardians & Carers of the Natural World’s pages are pastoral landscapes capturing rolling hills, meadows, and paddocks, birds in flight, crashing waves, a jaguar stalking through the bush by night, and up-close-and-personal detail shots of flowers in bloom. And though she might not be training her lens on actual people quite so much this time – bar images like the nude person lying peacefully in the grass – each image conveys the same sort of gentle intimacy that underpins much of Walker’s work.
Her favourite photo from this body of work, though, is an image of a shark, which she says is emblematic of the reason she wanted to create the book in the first place. “That image was taken in The London Aquarium. Swimming round and round, pinned to the perimeter of the tank in frustration, while adults and their children watched on eager-eyed, hands pressed up against the glass in awe,” she remembers. “It was an example of the distance we place between ourselves and nature. The glass that separates us from ‘them’ is the perfect example of our relationship with the natural world. A thing of beauty to be enjoyed without any real understanding of how it works, and its impact on us, should it fall.”
Click through the gallery above for a closer look at Walker’s debut book, and get your own copy here.