The Natural History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year touring exhibition stuns and shocks

As the annual Natural History Museum global touring exhibition Wildlife Photographer of the Year opens at The Base, Greenham. N2 reviewer LIN WILKINSON takes a pick of her favourite images.

Natural History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year 59 at The Base, Greenham until April 14.

A FIRM favourite in the calendar, the annual Natural History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition offers stunning pictorial images for viewers to enjoy, but increasingly many photographers emphasise the malign effects on the natural world of human behaviour, the built environment and climate change.

Double winner Laurent Ballesta (France) won the Portfolio Award for a striking panel of colour photographs illustrating the behaviour and habitat of the endangered golden horseshoe crab, one image also earning the photographer the Wildlife Photographer of the Year award. The crab looks almost inanimate, a golden metallic ‘hovercraft’ complete with ‘dents’, gliding along the sea-bed, three tiny fish darting above it.

There is much to enjoy in Carmel Bechler’s (Israel) discursive photograph – diffuse early morning light and skilful use of a very slow shutter speed to produce blurred contrails of moving cars – but the viewer has to look hard to home in on the central subject; two tiny owls peering out of an opening in an abandoned building. This photograph deservedly won the Young Photographer of the Year award.

Rachel Bigsby (UK) shows you don’t have to travel far to produce memorable photographs. Her fine black and white image, taken in Shetland, places two pin-sharp gannets against guano-coated sandstone cliffs; an illustration of how successful photography is an amalgum of time, light, a seeing eye and Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’.

By contrast, Joan de la Malla (Spain) photographed the Ciliwing, the most polluted river in the world, winding through the Jakarta metropolis, the city literally sinking from the effects of man-made pollution.

Given technological advances, some photographs have been taken using drones, and generally are the least interesting aesthetically. Happily this is not the case with Piotr Naskrecki (Poland); his steely grey composition treats a dead waterbuck in mud flanked by a mound of catfish almost as two sculptural elements.

Some photographs are hard to look at. David Lloyd’s (New Zealand/UK) image of a hyena bringing down a wildebeest shows nature red in tooth and claw. The negative effect of human society and behaviour on wildlife is encapsulated in Jasper Doest’s (Netherlands) photograph of a fatally-injured elephant, hit by a train in a Gabon national park. Dana Allen (USA/Zimbabwe) shows a leopard getting the rough end of a porcupine’s defensive quills.

There are hard-hitting panels from the photojournalism award-winners. Morgan Helm (USA) documents conservation efforts in north-west America to stop the decimation of the northern spotted owl by habitat loss through logging, and by the invasive success of the barred owl. His work poses an important question – is it ethical to cull one species to save another?

We probably need to ask David Attenborough.

Karine Aigner (US) documents – and questions – the Texas hunting ‘harvest’ of bobcats and rattlesnakes to make fur hats and boot cuffs for human adornment.

There are some telling abstract images. Michael Schober ‘s (Austria) masterly composition taken in the Namib Desert sets an emerald pool of water within the grey-gold landscape. Agorastos Papatsanis (Greece) has created a magical composition; clouds of mushroom spores move in an air current below the central verticality of a mushroom.

Some photographers exploit the creative possibilities of working in restricted colour. Max Waugh’s (USA) very strong, closely cropped composition of a bison in Yellowstone contrasts the animal’s sharp eye with flurries of snow. Amit Eshel’s (Israel) image of two clashing ibex is both dramatic and aesthetically pleasing. Mark Williams (UK/Canada) places a striking backlit Arctic fox centrally placed within the frame, with no context.

Running on a video loop are 25 other images, to my mind several more striking than some of the hung photographs. Nima Surikhani’s (UK) polar bear cub asleep on sea ice was the People’s Winner. Britta Jaschinski (Germany/UK) shows coats – made from pelts of endangered big cats – seized by European customs. A rescued chimp peers through bars (Roberto Garcia-Roa, Spain), and a bull elephant scavenges in a rubbish dump (Brent Stirton, South Africa).

Also on video are two pleasingly delicate images; a linear, almost ‘drawn’ study of aspens and bullrushes by Uge Fuertes Sanz (Spain); and a minimal image of a barn swallow over a meadow of cornflowers (Hermann Hirsch and Jan Lessman (Germany), suggestive of textiles or wallpaper.

Each photograph is accompanied by technical detail, and the gallery is suffused with a soundscape of the natural world, from high winds and stormy seas to soothing droplets of water.

In the adjoining Runway Gallery you can see ‘My Wildlife’, photographs by local photographers.

The exhibition is open Wednesday to Sunday, 10am to 4pm; also open 10am to 4pm on Tuesday, April 2, and Tuesday, April 9.

Book a slot – recommended.

Entry £10.95; concessions; under-5s free.