Why is animal photography so popular and can photographs help to save species from decline or extinction? Huw Lewis-Jones, author of a new book on animal photography, talks to David Clark
Wildlife photography is one of the medium’s most popular genres. In fact, we’re fascinated by images of animals of all kinds: from cute pet cats and dogs to the most extraordinary and exotic creatures found on Earth. Wildlife photography attracts big audiences, both online and in exhibitions, to marvel at both the animals themselves and the photographic skill, patience and natural history knowledge needed to capture visually spectacular images.
One high-profile example of the genre is the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, which celebrates its 60th anniversary in 2024. It now receives around 50,000 entries every year and the resulting exhibition is seen by millions of people as it tours the world. In parallel with our insatiable hunger for still images of wildlife, television documentaries such as the recent Planet Earth III and Blue Planet II are flourishing and reach vast audiences.
Paradoxically, our fascination for animals comes at a time when the world’s wildlife is under threat as never before, from a range of issues including deforestation and destruction of natural habitats, global warming and pollution. As Huw Lewis-Jones says in his new book, Why We Photograph Animals, ‘The desire to keep looking at animals is strong, even as they are disappearing in the wild… We are making more and more images of animals every year and yet animals are suffering on our planet as never before in human history.’
Huw is a historian and Associate Professor of Environment and Culture based in the Institute of Photography at Falmouth University. Previous jobs have included being a curator both at the Scott Polar Research Institute and the National Maritime Museum in London. Aside from his day jobs, he has written around 20 books and leads expeditions to Antarctica and to the Arctic, which also involves working alongside wildlife photographers.
Why We Photograph Animals is an exploration of wildlife photography in all its forms and is illustrated with a plethora of extraordinary images, from key historical images to the best of contemporary animal photography.
For Huw, the key motivation to write the book was to examine what makes us photograph animals and what we hope to achieve by doing it. He says, ‘The starting point was to say that there are lots of amazing wildlife photography books out there, as well as plenty of useful technique books on how to photograph wildlife. But instead of asking how, I wanted to create a book that asks why, which I think is more important.’
