More than 100 stellar images to enjoy at the 60th Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at The Base at Greenham

Wildlife Photographer of the Year

at The Base Greenham

until July 20

Review by LIN WILKINSON

THERE are over a hundred stellar images to enjoy at the 60th Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at The Base at Greenham, a firm annual favourite direct from London’s Natural History Museum.

The international photographers are concerned with the breathtaking beauty – and often the savagery – of the natural world, but also with its fragility. Many are rightly concerned with conservation, sustainability and climate change.

Photography works with three elements – time, light and human observation – and all come together brilliantly in William Fortescue’s (UK) stunning black and white image of a lion and lioness engaged in mating behaviour, which greets you as you enter the gallery. Mid-snarl and mid-leap, this caught-in-a-second image exemplifies Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’. Unlike landscape photography, here your subject moves.

The precarious co-existence of animals and humans, as the latter encroach on habitats, is a major concern. Robin Darius Conz (Germany) features a magnificent tiger lying on a hillside, uncomfortably close to a town where forests once grew. Jasper Doest (Netherlands) shows a dusky shot of elephants walking down a Zambian lane, their access allowed under a night-time curfew.

Less benign human behaviour is seen in Aaron Gekoski’s (UK) unsettlingly quiet but degrading image of an orangutan in boxing shorts seated against a red and yellow structure: a grotesque ‘photo opportunity’ for tourists to Thailand. Compare this to the image by Hikkaduwa Liyanage Prasantha Vinod (Sri Lanka) of a young toque macaque in its natural habitat, blissfully asleep in its mother’s arms.

Patricia Seaton Homonylo (Canada) has created an abstract circled pattern of 3,900 birds that died flying into Toronto windows in 2022: death transformed into art. Justin Gilligan (Australia) has created a formal mosaic from pieces of plastic ingested by a flesh-footed shearwater on Lord Howe Island. Germany’s Britta Jaschinski shows a CITIES officer at Heathrow checking the fingerprints on an ivory tusk, its curve contrasting with the vertical pelts of endangered animals hanging in the background.

Thomas Vijayan’s (Canada) image of meltwater from a glacier plummeting into the sea in Norway’s Svalbard is both a very pleasingly constructed, spare image in icy blues and whites – and a reminder of global warming.

A brown and ochre contrajour photograph taken in Columbia by Greg Basco (USA/Costa Rica) sets huge cacti against mountains and soft drifting cloud. Hung opposite, in similar subfusc colour, Alexey Kharitonov (Israel/Russia) has photographed cotton grass and pines amid the rising morning mist in the wetlands of Leningrad Oblast.

An out-of-focus flamingo surmounted by sharp, silver dewdrops caught in a spider’s web is a study in pink and white by Jan Leßmann and Hermann Hirsch (Germany). Jack Zhi (USA) unites colour and form in the yellow and grey plumage of a hunting falcon and its pelican prey, the two birds forming spiky salients in a featureless blue sky.

Colour is also an important compositional element in Ingo Arndt’s (Germany) image of an iridescent blue ground beetle being dismembered by red wood ants: killing by overwhelming numbers. Colour is key, too, in Antonio Liebana Navarro’s (Spain) strong composition contrasting the yellow and blue curved beaks of two Asian hornbills with the deep black of their feathers.

Of the photojournalist essays, Spain’s Jaime Rojo looks at efforts in Mexico and the USA to save declining populations of monarch butterflies; Germany’s Thomas Peschak charts the relationship between the Amazon’s endangered pink river dolphins and their human neighbours, who both revere and fear them, or see them as fish thieves.

Among the Young Photographers, Germany’s Alexis Tinker-Tsavalas shows an arresting macro image of a springtail insect on bulbous, fruiting slime mould. In contrast, Shreyovi Mehta’s (India) gentle, sun-lit image features two peafowl softly silhouetted against dark, overhanging trees. From Spain, Alberto Román Gomez’s strong composition contrasts the inert iron of a chain and lock with the fragility of a stonechat.

Theo Bosboom of the Netherlands shows a real seeing eye in his photograph of mounds of entwined mussels on a rocky Portuguese beach, their clumped, symbiotic forms preventing them being washed away.

An ambient soundtrack of land and sea sounds drifts through the gallery, and on a video loop viewers can see the People’s Choice images. In the adjoining Runway Gallery there is an open exhibition of photographs by adults and children, made in response to the main show

The show runs until Sunday 20 July (Tues-Sun; 10-4; book a slot). Entrance £10.95 (concessions). Relaxed days: 19 June and 17 July (10-5).