Inspirational environmental photographers pt 1.

The Head On Environmental Awards by Australia Geographic is a unique bracket within the roster of Head On Photo Awards categories (Portrait, Landscape and Student), that will support visual storytellers to explore the issues and challenges affecting the wellbeing of our environment. These include, but are not limited to, human-induced climate change, biodiversity loss, habitat destruction, unsustainable development, feral invasive species, pollution, ocean acidification and climate-change-induced extreme weather events.

The following photographers look beyond the landscape to see the world as an active agent – wishing to capture, raise awareness and drive positive change for the planet and the ways it is being impacted.

Art Wolfe is known for his stunning images of wildlife and natural landscapes from around the world. His work is often characterized by its focus on the relationship between humans and the natural world. Wolfe married landscape photography with conservation, working to care and conserve the flora and fauna he captures in his imagery.

Nadav Kander is renowned for his uncompromising and evocative images which cut to the heart of the human condition. Nadav Kander is a contemporary British-Israeli photographer known for his images of cities and landscapes, as in his photobooks Yangtze—The Long River (2010) and Dust (2012). Kander’s work often focuses on changes in society by capturing abandoned structures or those still being built.

As photographer on board the Bob Barker during the Sea Shepherd’s most successful Antartic Campaign, Glenn Lockitch was rammed by a harpoon ship and trailed by albatrosses. He hid hard drives from the AFP and helped save helped save 528 whales. The series he captured spread around the globe via AAP, Reuters, AFP and Getty Images. On May 17, Whale Wars arrives at Darlinghurst’s TAP Gallery as part of the Head On Photo Festival. Glenn will also speak over the seminar weekend on his extensive work photographing for NGOs including Greenpeace, The Wilderness Society, Old Growth Forest Preservation Society, The Greens and the Aboriginal Tent Embassy.

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Trained as a botanist, Anna Atkins developed an interest in photography as a means of recording botanical specimens for a scientific reference book, British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions. This publication was one of the first uses of light-sensitive materials to illustrate a book. Instead of traditional letterpress printing, the book’s handwritten text and illustrations were created by the cyanotype method. Atkins printed and published Part I of British Algae in 1843 and in doing so established photography as an accurate medium for scientific illustration.

James Whitlow Delano is an American, now Japan-based, photojournalist. Initially, James never sought to document Climate Change, but, as he explains, there’s no avoiding it;

“I never intended to show the consequences of the climate crisis, but I could not ignore it in my early travels in Asia, travelling through hours of environmental destruction to arrive at a small oasis…I would photograph the national park or the remote community just beyond the reach of resource extractors. At some point, I realised the ailing environment, en route, was the story.”

James is now the go-to photographer for global publications covering the climate crisis. In 2015, James created @EverydayClimateChange, an Instagram page that documents the effects of Climate Change across the globe. The page now has 137k followers. James exhibited an EverydayClimateChange project at Head On Photo Festival 2017.

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Peter Dombrovskis was an Australian photographer known for his expansive scenes of beautiful and wild Tasmania. In 2003, he was posthumously inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame, the first Australian photographer to achieve that honour.

Jamey Stillings (born in 1955) is an American photographer and artist known primarily for his aerial photography of renewable energy projects around the world, documenting the human impact on the environment

Shoufay Derz is an Australian artist of both German and Taiwanese ancestry. They use nature to lament the transience of life and the celebration of its mystery. Recently, Derz’s work harnesses the life-cycle of silk moths, glass and pure indigo pigment.

The themes in Nick Brandt’s photographic series always relate to the destructive impact that humankind is having on both the natural world and now humans themselves too. After directing Michael Jackson’s ‘Earth Song’ video in Kenya and Tanzania, Brandt was compelled to present a complex and deep portrait of African wildlife. A mix of awe, beauty and sympathy, his large scale soft-sepia photographs show the grandness of the wild combined with personal humility.

Evan’s photographic expression derives from his interest in exploring cultures, places, people and the natural environment. His series Light.Ash.White, exhibited at Head On Photo Festival 2022, is a black and white photographic narrative that captures the partial re-birthing amongst a landscape that still holds on to hectares of remnant white carcasses. The series marks the tenth anniversary of Black Saturday, Victoria, 2009. The imagery explores the impression of the environment’s current identity. It captures the acute changes created by the individual characteristics of the ferocious firestorm of the Kinglake, Marysville and the Lake Mountain regions.

Peter Essick is a photographer, teacher, and editor with 30 years of experience working with National Geographic Magazine. He specializes in nature and environmental themes. His goal is to make photographs that move beyond documentation to reveal in careful compositions the human impact of development as well as the enduring power of the land.

Joyce Tenneson is an American photographer who has been capturing the beauty of the natural world for over four decades. Her landscape images often feature ethereal and dreamlike qualities, with soft, muted colours and blurred edges. Her work boldly attempts to boil nature down to symbols, creating an all-encompassing iconography of the natural world. She asks, how do we create natural archetypes? Her work is a meditation of the mythology that surrounds the natural world.

Want to get back to nature? Enter the Head On Environmental Awards!