They are the ‘cream of the cream’ - a showcase of inspirational pictures from all over the world. And they’re in Guernsey, as Shaun Shackleton discovered when he visited The Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition TWO herons fight over a single fish, a solitary dolphin floats in a turquoise Bahamian sea and a shy brown bear, sad-eyed and wet-nosed, peers from the shelter of its mossy cave.
These are just three of the striking images on show in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2005 exhibition at the Guernsey Museum and Art Gallery.
The annual showcase displays winners from the largest and most prestigious wildlife photography competition in the world.
This year’s exhibition is the competition’s 22nd and the 15th time it has been to Guernsey. It showcases an inspirational collection of 84 winning and highly commended entries, chosen by an expert panel as the most expressive and creative of almost 17,000 entrants, from 55 countries.
‘This is the cream of the cream,’ said Alan Howell, the museum’s natural history officer. ‘We’ve even been lucky enough in the past to have had prizewinners from Guernsey.’
The main exhibition is on at the Natural History Museum in London from 22 October to 23 April. But so that the rest of Britain can see the winning entries, five representations of the exhibition are doing the rounds.
‘Every Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition we’ve held has been extremely well attended,’ said Mr Howell. ‘This is a good time of year to run such an event.’
The talent on display is breathtaking and displays both the photographers’ innate sense of knowing where to find the perfect subject matter and their enormous good luck.
Each winning entry comes complete with information on the artist and the story of how they captured their image.One eye-catching photograph is the winning entry in the Urban and Garden Wildlife category. Shot by Julian Smith, from Australia, it evokes the beautiful simplicity of nature in an otherwise unnatural environment.
Walking the streets of some dusty, small town, killing time while his car was being fixed, he stopped to watch a rugby match and spotted bogong moths swarming around the floodlights. The locals told him that millions of bogongs often descended on the town in spring as they migrated south.
He decided to use a long exposure to translate the moths’ flutters as scribbled signatures across the black sky. He had just one frame left on his last roll of film. The winning entry was that photograph.
Another simple but effective study was a side-view portrait of a red fox, yawning. This was the winner of the Eric Hosking Award, which was introduced in 1991 and named in memory of the famous British bird photographer.
Again, it’s the background story that is equally as interesting as the result. The photographer, Bence Mate, took it after carrying a large amount of equipment and five-days’ worth of supplies into the Transylvanian mountains.
During the session he took several shots of the fox and, as well as the winning photograph, another was a runner-up in the animal portraits section.
Elsewhere, swifts swarm and dive into the frothing flume of the Dardanelos Falls in the Brazilian Amazon, a lone macaque chews on cherry blossom and the winning entry, Sky Chase, by Italian photographer Manuel Presti, captures a swirling column of thousands of starlings clouding the sky. This stark, dramatic image is particularly poignant as the starling population in Europe is in rapid decline.
To heighten the atmospherics while viewing the exhibition, there’s a piped soundtrack of birdcalls and animal noises over ambient music.
Running in parallel with and complementing perfectly the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2005 exhibition, Helen Conlon, the fine art officer, has brought together a selection of paintings and other artworks from the museum’s 2,000-strong collection for The Nature of Art Exhibition.
Displayed in the Rona Cole Gallery, this simply staged but nonetheless vibrant and informative exhibition captures wildlife from a local, national and international perspective.
Mrs Conlon explains the essence of the exhibition: ‘This desire of man’s to paint and draw the living world around him comes from many sources, such as spiritual, religious, social, symbolic and storytelling. Later on in art history, other influences come into play - scientific investigation, status, personal artistic expression and pure aesthetics.’
Local artworks include Dixcart Bay by William Arthur Topliss - an exquisite and highly detailed watercolour showing particularly fine attention to the shore’s pebbles and rock faces - and Pollen Grains by William Caparne, which is believed to be a teaching aid used when the artist gave lectures.
Also featured are A Peacock and Two Peahens by Charles Frederick Tunnicliffe, a painting which took the artist from 1970-75 to complete, and the stunning oil Otter in a Landscape by Dutch painter Mathias Withoos.
This fabulous painting is called a landscape but besides a superb view of distant hills and woodland, it also contains intricate floral and plant studies and a highly detailed still life of three fish - the otter’s catch.
Both exhibitions offer a perfect balance of man’s view of nature, be it through the lens of a 21st-century digital camera, the fine strokes of a watercolour brush or the bold lines of a charcoal stick.
* Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2005 and The Nature of Art are on at Guernsey Museum and Art Gallery, Candie Gardens until 12 March. Opening times are 10am to 4pm daily.
Article posted on 8th February, 2006 - 12.00am
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