Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2021-2

This year I managed to visit the exhibition in person, although the excellent online version is to be commended. I noticed this year that after several embarrassments over provenance in previous awards all entries had the original camera files checked. I was not the only one to be surprised at the winner, and also at the lack of a b&w section this year.

It’s hard to find a new angle for this award. For example two lion images (Raw Moment by Lara Jackson of a female’s face dripping in blood and Ashleigh McCord’s Shelter from the Rain) have seen similar entries before, although the sticky almost textural detail in the former allows it to stand out. Personally I was particularly impressed with the winner of the urban wildlife award, who found a Brazilian Wandering Spider (one of the most venemous in the World) and her brood under his bed and reframed the scene as if it was a whole room, communicating the horror of the situation in a wonderful way.

An aspect of the images that is effective is the “expression” on the animals’ faces – although the tendency to interpret them with human eyes should be questioned, it is hard to escape the brain’s desire to decode. Hence the expression on the bat’s face above is for me the punctum in the image.

Similarly this image from the people’s choice section (which did not win but would have been my pick). The eagle looks very p*ssed off with the intruder in “its” tree, while the bear is completely nonchalant.

The clarity of Shane Kalyn’s image, shot in diffuse winter light at ISO 900, really brings out the expression on the raven’s face above. This time there is no need to humanise the communication between the birds, which is crystal clear.

Perhaps beyond the humanisation it is the stories of interaction between human and other species that increasingly carry the strongest message of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year these days. A group of 5 male cheetahs swimming the Talek river in the Masai Mara, for example, was particularly interesting to me – male cheetahs don’t normally live in packs and certainly don’t like water, both behaviours responses to the changing environment. But it was the entries in the Oceans: The Bigger Picture category which stood out for their narrative message, not easy to convey about a body of water:

The category winner is above although perhaps the situation is even clearer below:

Human greed is the clear topic of the second image, although the winner is made obvious by the title. This goes to what makes a great image – both in terms of the visual impact but also the picture’s ability to campaign.

For example, Douglas Gimsey’s photo of flying foxes dying from heat exhaustion huddled in a an Australian tree was an excellent example of a sorry situation but needed the context to work.

The anthropocene effect was also seen in a couple of graphic drone images redolent of Burtynsky – Javier Lafuente’s Road to Ruin of a road slicing up a wetland, and Rakesh Pulapa’s The Nurturing Wetland which showed the remains of a mangrove swamp surviving on the brink of a township.

I was, therefore, somewhat surprised at the overall competition winning image of spawning groupers, which while beautiful did not carry the weight of some of the other photographs.

Having said all of which, one of my favourites was Juergen Freund’s Mushroom Magic, which has a subtle message. The camera picks up the bioluminescence of ghost fungi, a form of communication we cannot see with the naked eye and do not yet understand…