Veolia Environment Wildlife Photographer of the Year, Natural History Museum, SW7 - review
One of London’s most popular photography exhibitions, this will next tour the globe and be viewed by millions. The hundred selected winners offer visual statements about the inhabitants of our changing planet, through images ranging from animal behaviour to humans’ behaviour towards animals. Ole Jorgen Liodden’s Living on Thin Ice rightly won the Environment prize for his lone polar bear sitting on a floe against the earth’s distant curve.
The overall winner, Paul Nicklen, presents dramatic beauty in Bubble-jetting emperors. Shot under Antarctic ice, it is suffused with the intense blueness surrounding the swimming penguins.
Environmental issues dominate the themes and as always, include shameful images. Primal Fear by Jabruson documents a Mozambiquan boy carrying a monkey to its death — its haunting facial expression identical to silent human terror.
But there is pleasure here too and my favourites are often among the under-17s. Owen Hearn’s Flight Path portrays the symbolism between a hovering red kite mirrored against a distant, ghostly plane; Eve Tucker’s City Gull exploits abstract Hockney-esque ripples as a background, fitting the increasing interest in graphic designs. Fine art references also pepper the exhibition: Rudi Sebastian’s The Crack (in polar ice) is reminiscent of Doris Salcedo’s Tate Modern slashed floor.
The enduring treatment of animals as objects is illustrated in David Chancellor’s Trophy Room, portraying the contrast between the South African hunter’s pride in stuffed animals and the concern, tenderness, respect and artistic fascination of the 48,000 entrants in this competition.
Until March 3, 2013. Contact: 020 7942 5000, nhm.ac.uk
