Animal Magic
Open 9am until 5pm
April 26th 2007 until 27th April 2008
Natural History Museum
£7 (adult) £3.50 (Children and Concessions)
Split in to 11 different categories this exhibition has been running 43 years. The space is set simply, letting the photographs speak for them themselves. And ‘boy’ do these images sit up and sing for their space. From catagories rangeing between ‘Animal Portraits’ and ‘Creative Visions of Nature’ the photographs are literally mesmerising.
Through the bustle of the Natural History Museum the exhibit stands out for its regimented but poetical layout of startling animals as they watch you from every wall. From the back wall of the ‘Nature in Black and White’ category an Artic Fox stares. The black of its eyes and nose and the top layer of dirty snow is all that is immediately visible in the picture. On closer inspection only the faint outline of the fox can be seen, the photograph grasps at the amazing potential of the creatures natural reliance on its habitat.
Sergey Gorshkov, winner of the ‘Animal Portrait’ award is the photgrapher of the “Bear Glare”. This photograph is disturbingly intimate. Gorshkov explains how he was photographing salmon in South Kamchatka when he came across the bear quite by chance. Both bear and man in the water, both searching for their own fishy prize when apparently they literally came nose to nose. Gorshkov, on meeting with the impressive mammal took his moment and photographed the bear. He wrote in his comment “I didn’t realise the danger I was in until after I had taken the photograph. In hindsight I was taking a rediculous risk.”
This chance close encounter is not unusual in the stories behind the pictures of this exhibit. In the ‘Behaviour of Mammals’ category, Cristobal Serrano Perez’s “Night Pride” shows five lions drinking, eyes fixed upon the camera lit up with infrared. Perez explains how the lions were watching her as she waited, but did not approach or seem affected by her presence. There is a stillness in this picture that seems so devoid of anything remotely unnatural that it is quite shocking.
This alarming intensity of nature is something that strikes you at every step through the gallery. There is something about the process of a gallery space that often leads you, as the viewer, to wander longingly it constantly aware of the process of the work and the effort or energy that went into each piece. It seems different here, as you move through the Shell Photography Exhibit you are unaware of your movements. Something will catch your eye and you will move on. You will stand watching a picture and yet never quite realise what you’re seeing. In short it is more a natural than a critical experience.
Perhaps the only thing that could improve this exhibition would be to take all the photgraphs out of the gallery and place each piece hanging in mid-air in smack bang into the subject’s natural habitat and leave it there – if were possible it would create a more natural divide between the maze of people and corridors at the Natural History Museum and these enigmatic and beautiful creatures.
Among the images of wildlife are some images of the natural world. At first these can seem off putting – too obviously overwhelming. However, we forget that you can never trick nature with an arrogant brain. Rob Knight’s “Ice Creation” which he won the ‘Wild Places’ category with has a diversity too challenging to nod surreptitiously at and shuffle on. The photograph is of a huge iceberg translucent in blue and white and crashing up to the height of its highest point is a wave. The wave, translucent and almost indistinguishable from the precarious iceberg, collides with the ice. The picture in its simplest form talks of a natural phenomenon between two densities battling for space.
In this exhibition there is a central grasping point, after much thought it seems to be the irrepressible fascination of what is still left natural in the world. For some reason we are always shocked when something almost untouched by human beings is so beautiful. People deny it all the time, but that is what amazes the crowds as they search for the photographic technique or the digital skill in the work; when really what makes the picture is the photographer’s moment with that natural visual which comes across. Without doubt that moment, those few milliseconds are not filled with concentration on the shutter speed or the zoom, but rather the secret insight into that part of our declining natural world which you and I hardly see.
Without doubt, if you go to see this exhibition, before walking back out onto the streets of a multifaceted modern London, you will be let into a secret – there is still diversity in life on this planet, just not where we might choose to look.
Open 9am until 5pm
April 26th 2007 until 27th April 2008
Natural History Museum
£7 (adult) £3.50 (Children and Concessions)
Split in to 11 different categories this exhibition has been running 43 years. The space is set simply, letting the photographs speak for them themselves. And ‘boy’ do these images sit up and sing for their space. From catagories rangeing between ‘Animal Portraits’ and ‘Creative Visions of Nature’ the photographs are literally mesmerising.
Through the bustle of the Natural History Museum the exhibit stands out for its regimented but poetical layout of startling animals as they watch you from every wall. From the back wall of the ‘Nature in Black and White’ category an Artic Fox stares. The black of its eyes and nose and the top layer of dirty snow is all that is immediately visible in the picture. On closer inspection only the faint outline of the fox can be seen, the photograph grasps at the amazing potential of the creatures natural reliance on its habitat.
Sergey Gorshkov, winner of the ‘Animal Portrait’ award is the photgrapher of the “Bear Glare”. This photograph is disturbingly intimate. Gorshkov explains how he was photographing salmon in South Kamchatka when he came across the bear quite by chance. Both bear and man in the water, both searching for their own fishy prize when apparently they literally came nose to nose. Gorshkov, on meeting with the impressive mammal took his moment and photographed the bear. He wrote in his comment “I didn’t realise the danger I was in until after I had taken the photograph. In hindsight I was taking a rediculous risk.”
This chance close encounter is not unusual in the stories behind the pictures of this exhibit. In the ‘Behaviour of Mammals’ category, Cristobal Serrano Perez’s “Night Pride” shows five lions drinking, eyes fixed upon the camera lit up with infrared. Perez explains how the lions were watching her as she waited, but did not approach or seem affected by her presence. There is a stillness in this picture that seems so devoid of anything remotely unnatural that it is quite shocking.
This alarming intensity of nature is something that strikes you at every step through the gallery. There is something about the process of a gallery space that often leads you, as the viewer, to wander longingly it constantly aware of the process of the work and the effort or energy that went into each piece. It seems different here, as you move through the Shell Photography Exhibit you are unaware of your movements. Something will catch your eye and you will move on. You will stand watching a picture and yet never quite realise what you’re seeing. In short it is more a natural than a critical experience.
Perhaps the only thing that could improve this exhibition would be to take all the photgraphs out of the gallery and place each piece hanging in mid-air in smack bang into the subject’s natural habitat and leave it there – if were possible it would create a more natural divide between the maze of people and corridors at the Natural History Museum and these enigmatic and beautiful creatures.
Among the images of wildlife are some images of the natural world. At first these can seem off putting – too obviously overwhelming. However, we forget that you can never trick nature with an arrogant brain. Rob Knight’s “Ice Creation” which he won the ‘Wild Places’ category with has a diversity too challenging to nod surreptitiously at and shuffle on. The photograph is of a huge iceberg translucent in blue and white and crashing up to the height of its highest point is a wave. The wave, translucent and almost indistinguishable from the precarious iceberg, collides with the ice. The picture in its simplest form talks of a natural phenomenon between two densities battling for space.
In this exhibition there is a central grasping point, after much thought it seems to be the irrepressible fascination of what is still left natural in the world. For some reason we are always shocked when something almost untouched by human beings is so beautiful. People deny it all the time, but that is what amazes the crowds as they search for the photographic technique or the digital skill in the work; when really what makes the picture is the photographer’s moment with that natural visual which comes across. Without doubt that moment, those few milliseconds are not filled with concentration on the shutter speed or the zoom, but rather the secret insight into that part of our declining natural world which you and I hardly see.
Without doubt, if you go to see this exhibition, before walking back out onto the streets of a multifaceted modern London, you will be let into a secret – there is still diversity in life on this planet, just not where we might choose to look.
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