Nature’s best is brought to life at Wildlife Photography Awards

Trapped beneath the waves: Turtle in Trouble by Jordi Chias Pujol (Spain)
5 April 2012

Beauty, strangeness and surprise are predictable reactions to the 100-plus photographs in this much anticipated annual event.

The ugliness and horrors of nature-in-the-raw are often alluded to but nature’s sophisticated designs and fearless colour combinations underlie every image. This year’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year, Bene Máté of Hungary, displays leaf-cutter ants (A Marvel of Ants) an image closer to a glossy oil painting than a photograph.

Similarly, the Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year (under-17s), Fergus Gill’s The Frozen Moment evokes a painting — a delicate Japanese water-colour of a fieldfare hovering over blossoms. Abstraction has increasingly entered the language of natural history photography and the Italian Georg Kantolier’s In Praise of Plants resembles a luminous oil-pastel drawing of grass.

Perennial favourites continue to include portraits of animals doing what they do, and amusing surprises like a gigantic turtle marching towards the camera, and Gerald Durrell’s Awards emphasise endangered species and cruelty to animals: the category "It’s just an animal" depicts the fate of snakes, caged birds and tigers, while Turtle in Trouble by Jordi Chias Pujol (Spain) sees the creature fatally tangled in a fishing net.

The domestic relationship between humans and animals is an important new subject. Artfully illustrated in Kai Faigerstom’s winning series The House In The Woods, it exposes the intruding racoons, rabbits and mice but emphasises the dark domestic scenes, reminding us of our close connections.

To March 11. Information: nhm.ac.uk, 020 7942 5000.

Veolia Environment Wildlife Photography Awards
Natural History Museum
Cromwell Road, London, SW7 5BD

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