The Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at Sydney’s Maritime Museum can’t but prompt questions about the role of art and photography in an age of environmental collapse and extinction. It consists of 100 photographs on loan from the Natural History Museum in London, chosen from close to 50,000 entries from 95 countries.
They are arresting, sometimes stunningly beautiful, sometimes confronting. As a long-time fan of the horseshoe crab I adored the Grand Title winner, an image by French photographer Laurent Ballesta of a golden horseshoe crab living in waters near Pangatalan Island in the Philippines.
Embedded in many images are stories of the incredible lengths to which photographers go to take the photo they need. Mexican photographer Fernando Constantino Martínez Belmar travelled through four kilometres of an underground cave system to send up his drone to capture images of the clearing of land for a new cross-country railway for tourists. A competition judge, Celina Chien, said of the image: “This photo captures the sheer magnitude and violence of deforestation … It instils almost a sense of panic – this laceration across the Earth that seems to go on forever into our future.”
She’s right. It’s an extraordinary photo – technically, in terms of the story it manages to tell, and also because of the physical commitment required to take it. Another photo that demanded physical commitment, The Ice Ibex by Luca Melcarne, is aesthetically one of the more glorious images in the exhibition. Melcarne had to ski for six hours in the French Alps and spend an extremely cold night in a shelter before stepping out in the morning to discover and photograph a small herd of Alpine ibex during a white-out.
Some photos, including Ballesta’s and Melcarne’s, allow the animal and its environment to speak for themselves. So, too, do Max Waugh’s joyous Snow Bison, Vishnu Gopal’s exquisite Face of the Forest, in which a lowland tapir steps out of Brazilian rainforest, and Australian photographer Caitlin Henderson’s brush-tailed possum eating a cicada, Possum’s Midnight Snack.
Other photographers offer more explicit commentary on the context in which the natural world and the creatures who live in it – including humans – struggle to assert themselves. Carmel Bechler won the Young Photographer of the Year with a wonderful shot of owls in an abandoned building watching traffic go by. Elza Friedländer’s Firebirds is a photograph of a pair of white storks standing in the shimmering heat of a landscape devastated by a controlled fire. Belgian-Dutch photographer Jef Pattyn has taken an extraordinarily stark image of a sailfish being dragged across a dock in Ecuador. One of the best landscape photographs is Joan de la Malla’s bird’s-eye view of the polluted Ciliwung River winding through Jakarta.
Some photos made me physically distressed and I had to look away. Piles of dead bobcats, a traumatically injured fox. I didn’t envy the photographers, Karine Aigner and Neil Aldridge respectively, who stood their ground and took those images. I was better able to absorb the work of Morgan Heim (United States), who documents the attempts to save the northern spotted owl. The subject matter is traumatic but she manages to convey its violence in a way I found easier to process. Her work was gentler.
My series of intense emotional responses to these works made me think more about how nature photographers position themselves in relation to the overwhelming number of challenges the world is facing today. One of the aims of the exhibition is “to capture both the beauty and the traumas faced by our natural environment and invite audiences to … understand the importance of protecting and advocating for wildlife conservation”.
So how do artists do this? What is the most useful reaction to provoke in a viewer? You feel the photographers searching for answers to these and other questions. I suspect there is no right answer – just a series of different approaches.
One of the things about environmental collapse is the sense of hopelessness that is triggered by the repetition of debate alongside political game playing, determined investigative work by journalists and our personal experiences of climate extremes. I often find myself looking at images of the natural world and thinking: I don’t know how to respond. I don’t know what to do.
The result – for me – is a kind of incapacity for critical or objective response. When I watch nature documentaries or look at nature photography, I find myself interrogating the different techniques filmmakers and photographers use, no matter what choices they make, no matter how well thought-through the ethical framework of the photo. I wish this weren’t the case, because these photographers are doing something and doing it far better than most of us. I am in awe of the skills and the commitment of the photographers in this exhibition. But my unease remains. Are photos that capture what is left of nature in its beauteous glory dodging the issue? Are those that make us face hard truths “using” suffering to create their art? Is the discomfort inherent in looking at such photos inevitable?
I’m not a good litmus test for these matters. I tipped over into climate grief some time ago, pushed across that line in 2019-20 when I watched far too many videos of animals dying, burning or fleeing the fires. I couldn’t sit through a wildlife documentary for some years before that and am increasingly allergic to “nature” documentaries such as My Octopus Teacher or Paris: A Wild Story. These are documentaries in which constructed, often artificial, narratives are imposed upon animals to create a greater sense of audience identification.
An exception to my inability to engage constructively with these shows was Tim Winton’s excellent television series on Ningaloo Reef, Ningaloo Nyinggulu. It features a long, dispiriting sequence about a failed coral spawning in which the spawn was trapped in a lagoon, which meant there wasn’t enough oxygen to keep it alive. Over the next week, 15,000 fish died from asphyxiation. I realised I’d never seen a nature documentary that showed this kind of failure of natural systems before. It made riveting viewing.
Another recent offering that came to mind when I looked at many of these images was Alex Garland’s film Civil War. I admired the film but it has divided critics, in part because of the neutral positioning of the main characters, who are photographers in the war zone. Lee Smith, the photographer played by Kirsten Dunst, says her job isn’t to take sides but to take images of the war so the viewer can decide what they think about it. Over the course of the film it becomes clear she no longer feels this is enough. A review in The New York Times said “a happy ending is impossible, which makes this very tough going. Rarely have I seen a movie that made me so acutely uncomfortable.” Thinking about this led me to the unnerving realisation that these days nature photography is war photography.
Of course, the role of war photography is increasingly contested. In 1972, photojournalist Nick Ut took a photo of then nine-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc running down a road, her body horribly burnt, following a napalm strike in Vietnam. The image is credited with changing opinions about that war. These days we witness a stream of images coming out of Ukraine and Gaza – to name just two current conflicts. They don’t seem to have the capacity to change the course of history the way such photos once did.
Perhaps these questions aren’t fair to the photographers. There aren’t right or wrong choices for a photographer to make. There is just skill, commitment and the taking of the photo. We, the viewers, can choose to look or to turn away. What we can’t afford to do is to swerve from action. Perhaps, then, my question for photographers is this: what does hope look like?
Wildlife Photographer of the Year is showing at the Australian National Maritime Museum, Sydney, until November 10.
ARTS DIARY
EXHIBITION Namedropping
MONA, nipaluna/Hobart, until April 21, 2025
OPERA Il Trittico
Sydney Opera House, Gadigal Country, July 3-19
DESIGN Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses
Gallery of Modern Art, Meanjin/Brisbane, until October 7
MULTIMEDIA Future Remains: The 2024 Macfarlane Commissions
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Naarm/Melbourne, until September 1
EXHIBITION Brent Harris: Surrender & Catch
Art Gallery of South Australia, Kaurna Yarta/Adelaide, July 6–October 20
LAST CHANCE
DESIGN Dorothy Erickson: Più di Cinquanta
Art Gallery of Western Australia, Whadjuk Nyoongar Boodjar/Perth, until June 30
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
June 29, 2024 as “Beauty in peril”.
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