For a lot of people, “The First Lesson of Killing,” a photo of two young cheetahs encountering an antelope (Slide 8), is among Tomasz Gudzowaty’s most powerful images, and he gets it.
“Here,” he said, “they
are still unsure what they want to do, and look as if they would like
to play with the little antelope. But their shy, innocent gesture is
frightening to everybody who knows the end of the story.”
Mr. Gudzowaty himself
is more partial to tableaux that show huge herds of wildebeests and
zebras. “They are perhaps less susceptible to symbolic reading,” he said
in an email, “thus requiring more effort from the viewer.”
Too demanding?
Well, consider what he
did to track down one of the world’s biggest emperor penguin colonies:
He went to Chile and then flew from there to the Patriot Hills Antarctic
base. Then he kept going, taking a small plane almost 500 miles to the
Weddell Sea. Eight days and two snowstorms later, he had his shots.
So, yeah, he may be a little hard-core.
A beast, even. But it
works for Mr. Gudzowaty, a 45-year-old Pole whose photography has taken
him to more than a hundred countries.
Of late, he has been
using a large-format camera, which has required some changes to his
approach. The title of his new book, published by Steidl, offers a hint:
It is called “Closer.” When it comes to photographing people, the unforgiving details in the portraits can raise uncomfortable issues.
“I think, however,
that in wildlife photography we are on the safe side,” he said.
“Animals, unlike humans, do not care about how they appear to our eyes.”
Still, a wise
photographer keeps as low a profile as he can. “I have a big respect for
nature,” he said. “Being unrespectful toward sea elephants can end
fatally.”
In his foreword to
“Closer,” Mr. Gudzowaty talks about how hard it was to reach the
penguins in Antarctica and then raises a question: “What was the point
of it all?” he wrote. “Why fly here, change planes, and sit in the
freezing cold just to take pictures of penguins, not people overthrowing
regimes, crossing the borders of other countries in tanks, or inciting
revolutions?”
In fact, Mr. Gudzowaty
has done a lot of work on social issues, including the child labor used
to dismantle ships in Bangladesh. But on a warming planet, he said,
wildlife photography can also be social issue photography. In places
like the Weddell Sea, the ice shelf is melting. “So,” he said, “there’s a
bit of politics going on here, too.”
Not to mention the
transcendental. When he goes to places like Antarctica, he said, it is
partly for the pure pleasure of seeing places “that look as if Genesis
only a happened a short while ago. As if the Creator still had his hands
in the clay.”
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