Stuart Dunn’s work will be a major attraction at the Travel Photographer of the Year show this summer, says Michael Kerr.
A participant in a BBC expedition dangles in front of the Kaieteur Falls in Guyana Photo: Stuart Dunn
“There are times,” says Stuart Dunn, “when you just have to go for it.” He certainly did to secure the picture above, winner of the Wild Moments category in the 2011 Travel Photographer of the Year competition held in association with the Royal Geographical Society. Images from the competition – one of the world’s most respected showcases for travel work – went on display yesterday at the RGS in London.
Dunn’s picture shows a participant in a BBC expedition dangling in front of the Kaieteur Falls in Guyana, which drops 746ft to its first break and is one of the most powerful waterfalls in the world. The photographer himself was attached to a harness on the cliff face opposite. “I managed to squeeze off just a few frames,” he says, “some of them showing the edge of the cliff. But this one was the best: the perfectly straight rope, the power of the falls and the tiny figure.”
Travelling to extremes has been part of Dunn’s life since he gained a masters degree in cinematography from the Northern Media School in 2003. One of his friends on the course was from Sri Lanka, and deeply disturbed by the way civilians were suffering in the civil war. He was determined to head for the Tamil Tiger-controlled north of that country – where journalists had recently been killed – and to document the plight of the 500,000 refugees who had been displaced by the fighting. Dunn went with him. “I didn’t know huge amount about the politics or the country,” he says. “But I was young and foolish and I said, ‘Let’s do it’. Jobs like that got my career in travel documentary started.”
That career, in which he combines photography and cinematography, has embraced programmes as disparate as Country File and Panorama, and taken him everywhere from New Zealand to Brazil. More recently, he has been documenting the travels to inhospitable spots of the adventurers Ben Fogle and James Cracknell and working on the BBC series Coast.
Having won the Wild Moments category of the RGS competition, he was sent to Valparai, in southern India, one of several places where a British charity, Elephant Family, is working to save the Asian elephant from extinction. Elephants survive there in corridors of jungle between tea plantations (see image below), but loss of habitat is increasingly bringing them into conflict with local people. Elephant Family is attempting to make the area safer for both humans and elephants, with educational programmes and early warnings to villagers of the animals’ presence that include both red lights and text messages.
The human side of the story was easy enough to tell. Capturing the elephants in pictures proved trickier. “We had 10 days,” says Dunn, “and from four in the morning till eight at night, we were hunting them every day – following their tracks, watching out for dung, treading warily. It was all quite scary.
“It wasn’t until the last day that I got some decent images of them, and I was very grateful. Not getting elephants in the frame would have been pretty bad form.”
Travel Photographer of the Year exhibition
The Travel Photographer of the Year show is at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), 1 Kensington Gore, London SW7 2AR, until August 19; 9.30am-5pm Mon to Sat 10am-4pm Sun. Entrance is free. For details, see tpoty.com
On sale at the show will be a Travel Photographer of the Year portfolio book, Journey Four (£25), containing the winning images from both the 2011 and the 2010 competitions.
Click here to see more of the best images from the exhibition
For more of Stuart Dunn’s photography, see stuartdunnphotography.com
source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk / Home> Travel> Festivals and Events / by Michael Kerr / June 20th, 2012