Natural History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition opens in Greenham

Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at The Base at Greenham. Review by LIN WILKINSON

The Natural History Museum’s ever-popular annual Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition is currently showing at The Base, Greenham.

Technical expertise and high-quality printing can be taken as read, but most important is the photographer’s ‘seeing eye’. Photography is often about what Cartier Bresson called “the decisive moment”, but it can also involve a dogged determination to get the ultimate shot, however long it takes and physically arduous the process.

These images celebrate the rich diversity of the natural world, but they are not purely aesthetic. They also confront the crucial effects of climate change, loss of habitat, poaching and human depredation.

Sergio Marijuan’s beautifully structured image of an endangered Iberian lynx is centrally framed within a doorway; harmony of composition and colour, combined with a photographer’s instinct to hit the shutter at just the right nanosecond.

In the Wetlands section, Henley Spiers shoots from a low viewpoint as a turtle nestles within brilliantly lit pink waterlilies reaching up to the water’s surface.

Again this year, the Photojournalism panel is hard-hitting, reflecting our inhumanity to the animal world. Adam Oswell has photographed a young captive elephant ‘performing’ underwater at a Thai zoo; we are witnesses to exploitative, demeaning, unnatural behaviour masquerading as an educational event.

The bare, soulless, concrete space in which Celina Chien shows a captive orangutan in China, could not be further from the primate’s natural forest-canopy habitat. Taken from the back, we share the ape’s bleak viewpoint.

Stefano Unterthiner’s image of two reindeer in the snow fighting for control of a herd is a study in black and white, the enmeshed antlers the central focal point.

Wei Fu’s image of craneflies mating on a spider web is as much an abstract composition of line, form and colour as a study in insect behaviour.

Perhaps the strangest image is George Kantioler’s Spot of Bother, in which a paper-wasp colony on a Tyrolean wayside shrine has almost formed the genitalia or loincloth of the crucified form.

Viewers will find it hard not to anthropomorphise the mountain gorilla enjoying cooling rain in Majed Ali’s closely cropped photograph. It’s a quiet, contemplative image, with a palpable sense of peace.

We see the polar opposite in Lara Jackson’s Serengeti lioness, as she looks up from devouring a wildebeest, her nose and muzzle dripping with fresh blood.

Will Burrard-Lucas shows a powerful, minimal, night-time shot of a black leopard, its alert eyes highlighted and pin-sharp.

In Buddhilini de Soyza’s photograph of cheetahs swimming across a Kenyan river in search of prey, their heads are almost camouflaged within the browns and creams of the foaming torrent. In the Young Photographers’ under-10 category, Vidyun R Hebbar’s winning shot sets the domed web spun by a tent spider against an abstracted orange and green background.

Some photographs captivate us with their colour and design, until we realise that the elements in Gheorghe Popa’s image are caused by toxic heavy metals seeping into a Romanian river.

So, too, in Audun Rikardsen’s wide-angle shot in icy, metallic blues and greys. Here a fishing vessel sits amid a mass of dead and dying herring: the stark reality of over-fishing.

Knut-Sverre Horn uses extreme cropping in Departure, the barely glimpsed feet and beak of kittiwakes making for a marginal composition in which empty space is as important as the figurative elements. Well-handled composition and colour cannot detract from some hard-to-look-at images, including Wei Fu’s photograph of a gecko’s desperate battle against the compressing coils of a golden tree snake.

Among the portfolios, Martin Gregus’s gentle panel considers the loving domestic life of polar bears and their cubs. Brent Stirton documents chimpanzees orphaned by the bushmeat trade, and their carers, many of the latter survivors of military conflict in the Congo.

• The exhibition runs until Sunday, April 3 (Wed-Sun 10am-5pm; last entry 4pm; booking required).