Legendary veteran US outdoor and wildlife photographer Art Wolfe is coming to Australia to explain the techniques he uses in capturing nature at its most pristine. He talked to Denis Glennon about his career and his inspiration.
Art Wolfe is a photographer and anthropologist, but he has an artist’s eye. Another anthropologist and ethnobiologist, Dr Wade Davis, is one of the world’s great story tellers, with personal adventures to match. As an “Explorer-in-Residence at National Geographic”, he has specialised in spending time (over the last 30 years) with indigenous communities worldwide, exploring their cultural practices. He lectures all over the world on what it means to be human and alive – living within nature and using and respecting its biodiversity. He sees us as a “wildly imaginative and creative species.” He follows the human diaspora and shows how our ancient past can help us to protect our future – he’s an anthropologist who stands out from his fellow professionals.
Art Wolfe works like Davis, only with images. Over the last 30 years, Art Wolfe has photographed on every continent and in hundreds of locations. He has authored over 65 books, each full of outstanding images which interpret and document the planet’s disappearing wildlife, ecosystems and native cultures. Like Davis in his books, Wolfe’s pictorial stories are an inspiration to those who seek to understand and preserve the fragile parts of our planet. His photographs are instantly recognised for their mastery of composition, perspective and artistic expression. Wolfe is one of the world’s greatest pictorial story tellers. Using a intermingling of artistic and journalistic styles to create his signature eye-catching images, Wolfe’s photography documents his subjects and captivates observers. Over a lifetime of creating images he has transformed nature and wildlife photography into an art form. His close ups of animals, frequently taken with wide-angle lenses, are astonishing; he seems to captivate them, and his mind, eyes and lens seem to seek their soul. Looking at his photographs you can feel the connection he makes with his subjects when he presses the shutter button. I’ve used the comparison with Davis simply to show their individual, yet analogous emphasis on storytelling, and to illustrate how good Wolfe really is. He stands alone in terms of sustained brilliance in photographing the natural world over the past 30 or so years.
Early Interest
Art Wolfe’s childhood home was full of artists’ things he could touch, hold and feel – brushes, tubes of paint, paper, canvases, wet paint, wet ink, and the like. Photography was not his first medium of expression – as the son of commercial artists, painting and drawing were his first choices. It was the same in art school at Washington University. But a couple of years into college his allegiance shifted from painting to photography because it was easier to create original compositions with a camera and there was less “gear” to carry when mountaineering. His start in photography was documenting the climbs and trekking he was undertaking – to show what it was like on the top of glaciers. That photography rapidly went from documentation to becoming art, as he drew more from his art studies to aid his image-making. He was always clear on what he wanted to capture – landscapes, wildlife and nature. When he was in his teens he started selling paintings to friends of his parents...
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: How David Haworth shot this promotional image; How to get more creative without Auto mode; Profile - Herbert Basedow; Secrets of macro photography; Locations - Maffra Region, Vic; Sony Alpha a77 SLT
