photography

For 50 years, the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition has championed honest and ethical wildlife photography, while pushing the boundaries of artistic freedom, technical skill and narrative excellence. This powerful collection of pictures features all the winning photographs from the 2014 competition. The collection represents the work of many international photographers, both professionals and amateurs. The photographs are chosen by an international jury for their artistic merit and originality, from categories that together represent a diversity of natural subjects. The range of styles is also diverse, as is the genre of photography, whether action, macro, underwater, landscape or environmental reportage. Together this outstanding collection is a reminder of the splendour, drama and variety of life on Earth. Each stunning photograph is accompanied by an extended caption and there is an introduction by one of the world’s most respected nature photographers.

In this book, Ingo Arndt explores marvels of nature with spectacular imagery, showcasing the complex and elegant structures that animals create both for shelter and for capturing prey. Arndt’s photographs display wonders such as the colourful mating arenas of bowerbirds in West Papua and the fantastic nests created by ants in Africa. Studio photographs supplement the images from Arndt’s journey and offer close-up views of the nests, mounds and webs constructed by the animals. Features both breathtaking photography and scientific insight into animal behaviour.

Presents an epic photographic journey through time and space. Over the past decade, artist Rachel Sussman has worked with biologists, and travelled the world from Antarctica to the Mojave Desert in order to photograph continuously living organisms that are at least 2,000 years old. The result is a stunning and unique visual collection of species unlike anything that has been created before. She begins at “year zero,” and looks back from there, photographing the past in the present. The ancient subjects live on every continent and range from Greenlandic lichens that grow only one centimetre per century, to unique desert shrubs in Africa and South America, predatory fungus in Oregon, Caribbean brain coral, and an 80,000-year-old colony of aspen in Utah. She journeyed to Antarctica to photograph 5,500-year-old moss; Australia for stromatolites, which are organisms tied to the oxygenation of the planet and the beginnings of life on Earth; and Tasmania to capture a 43,600-year-old self-propagating shrub that’s the last of its kind. These portraits reveal the living history of our planet-and what we stand to lose in the future.
These ancient survivors have weathered millennia in some of the world’s most extreme environments, yet climate change and human interaction have put many of the species presented here in danger. Two of her subjects have already met with an untimely death. Alongside the photographs, Sussman combines tales of her worldly adventures tracking down these subjects with informative insight from the scientists who are studying them and their environments. The result is an original index of millennia-old organisms that provides a record and celebration of the past, a call to action in the present, and a barometer of our future. Sussman’s work is both timeless and timely, and the book spans disciplines, continents, and millennia. Underlying the work is an innate environmentalism driven by Sussman’s relentless curiosity.