Going where the wild things are

Wildlife Photographer of the Year Awards: South Africans steal the show in London this week

SOUTH African talent dominated the "Oscars of nature photography" in London this week, including winning the grand title of Photographer of the Year and the much coveted Wildlife Photojournalist award.

Local lensmen's work was among 43000 entries from 96 countries at the prestigious competition organised by BBC Worldwide and London's Natural History Museum. The awards celebrate the most dramatic and revealing moments in nature as captured by thousands of amateur photographers and some of the biggest names in wildlife photography.

Pretoria's Greg du Toit bagged the competition's grand title, Wildlife Photographer of the Year, as well as the top position in the Animal Portraits category.

"It was surreal sitting in that room with all those iconic photographers. One came up to me afterwards - someone who'd won three years before - and he told me he cried while accepting his award. He could hardly speak. It really put it in perspective," said Du Toit, who was recognised for "The Essence of Elephants", an enigmatic and arresting portrayal of African elephants in Botswana's Tuli block.

South Africans won four of the 15 categories in the competition, now in its 49th year. This was more than any other country except the US, which also secured four category wins.

Du Toit, 35, rose to international media attention in 2009 after spending 13 months in a dugout hollow next to a Great Rift Valley waterhole, and another three submerged in the water itself, to capture some of the last wild lions on Maasai community land.

"I ended up getting quite sick by picking up parasites and things like that," said Du Toit, whose coffee-table book on his work, Awe, was released yesterday. "Everyone started telling me what an idiot I was. I was contacted by one herbalist in New York who swears these parasites will one day go into my brain and kill me."

Du Toit only became a full-time professional photographer in 2008 after life as a safari guide and camp manager in Southern and East Africa. A year later, BBC Wildlife Magazine published his Maasai lion portraits. The photographs were published by most major UK broadsheets and tabloids.

He credits his success to the many hours he spent in the bush as a safari guide observing wildlife and his irrepressible instinct to tell visual stories.

"I became an expert in animal behaviour and taught myself photography," he said, although people warned him he would never make a living as a wildlife photographer. "And I was, like, I don't have an option. It's not like I can become an accountant or anything."

One of the competition's most coveted titles, the Wildlife Photojournalist Award, was scooped by Durban-raised Brent Stirton, an environmental photographer who devotes most of his professional time to long-term investigative projects for National Geographic magazine.

Stirton was honoured for his photographic project, "God's Ivory", which was published as National Geographic's cover story in October last year. The upshot of a three-year investigation, the project comprises a series of thought-provoking and stomach-churning images that reveal the complicity of world religion in the worst elephant- poaching crisis since the global ivory-trade ban was enacted in 1989.

During one series of massacres between January and March last year, a group of armed men from Sudan travelled to Cameroon and gunned down more than 600 elephants in just three months. Stirton's work spans these killing fields as well as the East's religious consumer markets, where the demand for ivory as an ornamental material with so-called mythical powers is great.

Stirton admits it was difficult to remain detached while investigating these scenes.

"I get very angry on a regular basis. You have to - you must keep some kind of emotional content going if you are not going to become cynical, but I process that disgust by trying to put it in my pictures," said the photographer. He studied journalism and became interested in photography during his South African military service - a time that made him aware of the "true politics of the country": "I just became more conscious."

In 2007 he took a series of portraits of mountain gorillas that had been killed in the Congo. "From then on I've worked quite constantly on the intersection of man and nature," said Stirton, whose work has also appeared in Newsweek, Time and The New York Times Magazine.

"God's Ivory" has made an international impact. "The Catholic Church has issued statements against [elephant poaching] as a result of it. People have been excommunicated from the church in the Philippines. Hillary Clinton used the article to enact US state legislation to address poaching."

Other winning images by South Africans at this year's competition include Bryanston photographer Isak Pretorius's depiction of a lesser noddy, a bird with a wingspan of 60cm to 70cm, entangled in a giant Seychelles spider web. A red-legged golden orb web spider lords it over the gummy trap of conjoined silk. Titled "Sticky Situation", the photograph won the Birds: Behaviour category.

Andrew Schoeman's moody nocturnal portrait of a pacing Timbavati lion was awarded runner-up in the Nature in Black and White category, and Wim van der Heever's leaping pod of Port St Johns dolphins netted him the runner-up position in Animals in Their Environment. Hannes Lochner's take on an inquisitive Kalahari lion cub, captured with a custom-built remote trigger, earned him a runner-up slot in the Animal Portraits category.

Lou Coetzer's image of lion cubs play-fighting during the golden hour at a remote Etosha waterhole was commended in the Mammals: Behaviour category. Thomas Peschak received a special commendation for exposing a new craze in the Chinese medicinal trade: the trade in gill rakers - the feathery mechanisms that aid the filtration of planktonic food in manta and mobula rays.

"I'm incredibly proud of our South African photographers. We came in at such a disadvantage," said Du Toit. "I mean, you just have to look at the phenomenal story budgets those big-name photographers have. One National Geographic photographer recently built an infrared 4x4 and they shipped it all the way from the UK - just so he could get a night-time shot of lions ... and our guys drive out into the bush with like this little spotlight.

"But we had the cream of South Africa's wildlife photographers there and most of us had been at the awards before, so it wasn't as if we just got lucky, hey."

Du Toit smiled: "We really showed those National Geographic boys ... "

The "God's Ivory" documentary can be viewed on YouTube.

Visit www.gregdutoit.com for details on his new coffee-table book, Awe.

The 50th Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition will open for entries on December 9.

Visit nhm.ac.uk for details.