Showing posts with label wildlife. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wildlife. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Wild Talk Africa - Social Documentary Photographer


I had the pleasure of documenting Durban's Wild Talk Africa 2013 Conference and Film Festival.  This event focuses on the growth of business in the wildlife film industry, hosting international commissioners from broadcasters around the world and showcasing amazing talent and pitches from filmmakers across the African continent.  It also included networking parties, exhibitions, screenings and premiers, along with a film awards ceremony.

  Throughout the three day conference, I was able to weave between open pitching sessions, seminars and workshops that were hosted by inspiring and talented folks.  Durban's sun-filled winter weather added to the vibrant nature of the conference that was organised by the team at Natural History Unit Africa.

 Take a sneak peek at the different faces and scenes that happened in and around Durban's bustling port hotel, Docklands.

 For more photos check out Wild Talk Africa's Facebook page.

Top right: Donfrey Meyer- Wild Talk Festival Director, bottom right & top left: Sky Lab Productions, bottom left: Homebrew Films, Claudio Velasquez Rojas 
Open Pitching Sessions.  Candid shots of BBC's Natural World-Chris Cole's animated feedback
Peter Hamilton of DocumentaryTelevision.com gave such great workshops and seminars. Here's him passing his business card.  I was amazed on how many candid business card exchanges I captured during the conference.

Open Pitching sessions with Commissioners.  Top right: NHU Africa's Vyv Simpson. Middle row: Discovery Channel's Helen Hawken, Bottom left: Off The Fence, Allison Bean. Bottom right: NHK Masahiro Hayakawa, 

Top left: Exhibitors at Wild Talk are having fun.  Top right: TOPTV Content Editorial Mangaer, David Makubyane. Bottom left: Happy Wild Talk Camerman: Nyembezi Ncaba.  Bottom right: Laurent Flahault, TAIA Visions France Television


Pitching Sessions with Top Left: Fox International, Thandi Davids. Right: Thomas Matzek, NHU ORF. Bottom left: Chris Fletcher, Earth Touch

Top left: Dairen Simpson from Triosphere Productions's Trapped, enjoying Durban's sunshine.  Right: Chris Mason, NHU Africa posing in To Skin a Cat's faux leopard fur.  Bottom Left: Julie Frederiksen of Vuleka Productions chatting it up at Docklands Hotel.
Delegates listening during workshops and seminars.  Left:  Nothando Shozi, Head of Factual Genre, SABC

Top left:Thomas Matzek enjoys Durban Wild Talk 2013. Top right: Julian Rademeyer, author of Killing for Profit, chairs a seminar on War Stories: Rhino Poaching.  Bottom Middle: Director of Saving Rhino Phila, Richard Slater-Jones, shares insights during the Wild Talk seminar on Rhino Poaching.

NHK Japan's Masahiro Hayakawa is all smiles after the speed pitching session.

Delegates head out for the Wild Talk networking parties on Durban's beachfront

  For more photo albums check out Wild Talk's Facebook page.

  For documentary photography, contact Athena Lamberis, Athenailya@gmail.com

Thursday, April 25, 2013

David Chancellor's Hunter and Hunted: Images of Social Ecology and Wildlife Economy



David Chancellor: "I'm called a documentary photographer."

In the small lunchtime lecture room at Cape Town School of Photography, we travelled across the Kalahari, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Kenya with Chancellor's 'Ghost Train.'  He described the 'Ghost Train' as a viewer's journey to an unknown place of understanding when viewing some of his images. In his medium format film image, Huntress with Buck, he pointed out that you may see the landscape first, then the girl, then the light, and then wonder about the girl in this landscape.  As a viewer, you may not know where the photo story is going until you start to engage with your own observations and relations.  The 'Ghost Train' experience left my husband, Chris, and I with a feeling of inspiration and engagement with questions of our own.

The Huntress with Buck image won the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery, London.

  I was inspired by his technique of 'slow journalism.'  By shooting on film, he finds himself engaging more with people than people being more interested in what he is capturing.
"I like the fact that people can't look at the back of the camera and see an image."
"I don't like digital, full stop."

  His time spent on the series, Hunter, took years to confront people's suspicions and battled with people's perceptions of why he was taking interest in documenting, "What actually happens in the Hunting Industry?"  As a documentary photographer, he looks at subjects that people aren't seemingly familiar with.  He develops trust within a culture, an industry, which in return allows him to develop hundreds of rolls of film.  By default, his photo series weave a story around human wildlife conflict and tourist trophy hunting.

  His sensory process of using film inspires other questions in his work.  While shooting Hunter and Hunted, he came in close contact with dead or dying animals.  In Safari Club and Diorama and Cases, he explored the 'life' of animals stuffed and put back in their natural form.

He explained that his personal work of Hunter, Hunted and Safari Club took 6 years, 4 of which were shooting.  Chancellor wanted to understand after the years of Sir Peter Scott's conservation of wild animals, "Where are we now?"

I recently saw his photo, Untitled Hunter #1, Trophy Room taken in Dallas, Texas at the Wildlife Photography of the Year Exhibition, hosted by NHU Africa and the Iziko Natural History Museum in Cape Town, South Africa.


  The photo taken in Texas, as a part of Safari Club series, was the only photo in the Wildlife Photography Exhibition that had only one living animal in the picture; the Untitled Hunter.  The photo surfaces debate around conservation, ecology, hunting and invites discussion around Social Ecology and Wildlife Economy.  As for the man known as the Untitled Hunter, he has asked David for a print.


   Chancellor continued his lunchtime lecture by sharing some of his current unfinished work in Kenya with Rhino poachers and also some 'snaps' of his family.
"As photographers, we should be able to do anything."
"You don't need people to pigeon hole you"


 I walked away from David's lecture engaged.
 Engaged with the need to question.
 Engaged with the want to understand.
 And engaged with urge to document.
 I'll continue to do so, on all mediums . . . and free from any pigeon holes.




Saturday, September 22, 2012

World Rhino Day 2012: Do you care if Rhinos disappear?

 

 Our Earth loses 2 rhinos a day due to acts of killing these endangered animals for money.

 Rhinos are poached predominantly for exotic animal-part trade or medicinal mythical cures-medical ideas that have been scientifically proven to not treat or cure what they are advertised for.

 The value of protecting rhinos needs to be taught in order to replace the value of trading their parts.  Poaching is not the only problem, but it is the most important one to stop as educational projects and programmes can reverse the idea that the demand for them is necessary.

   A man in South Africa, as seen in NHU Africa's Saving Rhino Phila has begun to farm as a way to influence a flood of rhinos horns into the marketplace, thus reducing their price and striving to maintain a healthy rhino population. But farming rhinos is not a solution as it doesn't eliminate the myths of these medical 'cures' and provides a 'safe' place for killing animals that will be may one day be called "previous wildlife, now cattle".  Although there are other human-caused risks to rhinos, it is imperative to stop poaching these animals and supporting positive wildlife conservation education.


  Human-centric ideas such as rhino horn uses for human consumption only decrease the longevity of our wildlife and will drive them into extinction.  We have a responsibility to our planet to work towards becoming wildlife conservation activists in our own capacity.

  Chris Mason from Natural History Unit Africa, produced and directed this Public Service Announcement, PSA, for World Rhino Day 2012: a Call for action to support Anti-poaching projects by WESSA, The Wildlife and Environment Society of South Africa. They filmed it on Kloof Street, Cape Town City Bowl, on a timelapse and reversed the Mak 1 One art piece into a disappearing artpiece.

  It asks a question:  Do you care if Rhino's disappear?  

    Let's hope this message and many other efforts allow us to care everyday to take responsibility to the stop of poaching.  

  Ideas to combat poaching through education projects are welcome to be shared here.




  Other artists share concern about the killing of Rhinos.  The Wooster Collective showcased words and pictures from another prolific Cape Town based graffiti aerosol artist, Faith47,  painting in Shanghai, click here to see and read.  She brought the spirit of African Rhinos into Asia.


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