A tender image of a young polar bear drifting off to sleep in a bed he carved out of an iceberg has won over the masses. The photograph, titled Ice Bed, won British amateur photographer Nima Sarikhani the People’s Choice Award for the Wildlife Photographer of the Year, a prize organized by London’s Natural History Museum.

To capture the image, Sarikhani spent three days searching for polar bears through a dense fog around Norway’s far-northern Svalbard archipelago. Finally encountering a young male bear just before midnight, he watched as it climbed the small iceberg, clawed away at the sea ice, then curled up into a serene slumber.

In a statement, Douglas Gurr, the museum’s director, described the image as a poignant reflection on habitat loss: “His thought-provoking image is a stark reminder of the integral bond between an animal and its habitat.”

The photograph was selected from a shortlist of 25 images, whittled down from 50,000 submissions. A record 75,000 voters participated in the 59th installment of the competition. The image, along with four other “highly commended” finalists, will be on view at the London museum through June 30.

Audun Rikardsen, Aurora Jellies. Photo: © Audun Rikardsen / Wildlife Photographer of the Year.

The other finalists include Norwegian photographer Audun Rikardsen, who captured Aurora Jellies, an ethereal image of the aurora borealis illuminating the night sky over the waters of a fjord, aglow with the bioluminescence of moon jellyfish.

Kenyan Photographer Mark Boyd captured two lionesses grooming one of their shared cubs together after an unsuccessful hunt. Lionesses raise each other’s cubs as their own. Shared Parenting evokes the bond of sisterhood as well as the universal love of motherhood.

Mark Boyd, Shared Parenting. Photo: © Mark Boyd, Wildlife Photographer of the Year.

Starling Murmuration by German/Romanian photographer Daniel Dencescu was shot in Rome, Italy. He followed the starlings across the city for days as they danced across the sky, creating enchanting organic shapes. In Israeli photographer Tzahi Finkelstein’s The Happy Turtle, a balkan pond turtle smiles as a northern banded groundling dragonfly pays it a visit in the swampy waters of Israel’s Jezreel Valley.

Tzahi Finkelstein, The Happy Turtle. Photo: © Tzahi Finkelstein / Wildlife Photographer of the Year.

Daniel Dencescu, Starling Murmuration. Photo: © Daniel Dencescu / Wildlife Photographer of the Year.

The prestigious Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition celebrates the nature-focused work of amateur or professional photographers. The 60th edition is currently being judged by an international panel, with its winners set to be announced in October 2024.

“Wildlife Photographer of the Year” is on view at the Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, South Kensington, London, through June 30.

Follow Artnet News on Facebook:
Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward.

Whitstable, Kent

Sirens of Sewage, by Jason deCaires Taylor, which portrays a cold-water swimmer, a school child, kite surfer, a lifeboat volunteer and a local fisherman. The beach artwork celebrates local volunteers who are part of a national network driving public discourse and political action to safeguard water bodies and marine ecologies

Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA

Photographer Helga Paris, who captured daily life in Soviet Union-occupied East Berlin, has died at the age of 85.

According to the DPA international, Paris’ daughter confirmed that the photographer had died on February 8 in her apartment in the German capital.

Paris is one of few East German women who was recognized for her photography at the time of Soviet Union occupation in the country.

Self-taught photographer Paris was born in 1938 in Goleniów, Poland, and grew up in Zossen, Berlin.

Paris grew up with a passion for photography — after being inspired by her two aunts who were enthusiastic photographers. She constantly took pictures from the 1940s through the 1960s.

Paris moved to Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood after marrying her husband Ronald Paris in 1966. She began seriously taking photographs a year later.

Her work focused on people and streetscapes, initially in Berlin where many of her subjects were neighbors and friends.

However, Paris is perhaps most famous for her photo series Women at Work.

In 1984, the German photographer spent several weeks at the state-owned Treff-Modelle clothing factory in Halle, East Berlin capturing over 1,500 photographs of female employees.

Paris’ black-and-white pictures for Women at Work captured the garment workers in the clothing factory and their “unforeseen beauty.”

According to The Brooklyn Rail, Paris often snapped the camera shutter before her sitters even realized — leaving little time for preparation, but brought an authenticity to each image.

Paris also never used flash in her photography, instead using natural light to establish focal points on each face.

‘I have always been drawn to the every day, the unspectacular,” Paris said of the portraits.

“But I didn’t photo­graph it clinically, aseptically; rather, I tried to reproduce it as realistically and as hauntingly as possible.”

Paris also traveled outside of Berlin, shooting in Transylvania and Georgia. Paris said that no matter where she was, she tried to photograph everything “like a foreign city in a foreign country.”

Her career as a freelance photographer survived German reunification in 1989 and Paris’ photographs gained a wider interest as a historical record of the GDR.

Paris was a member of Berlin’s Akademie der Künste arts academy since 1996. She has left her archive of almost 230,000 negatives and around 6,300 films to the art institution.

This I’m a Berkeleyan was written as a first-person narrative from an interview with fourth-year student Vishal Subramanyan.

I always tell people I’m a naturalist first and a photographer second. If I didn’t have a camera, I would still be going out and observing wildlife.

I’ve lived in the Bay Area my whole life. Growing up, both my parents were fond of nature in different ways. My mom really loved animals, and my dad was really into camping and hiking. But I also had my own passion for wildlife. My favorite thing to do in childhood was to watch David Attenborough documentaries, and I was particularly obsessed with bears. When I saw congregations of brown bears together fishing salmon in Alaska, I thought, “Wow, that’s something I want to see!”

When I was 13, my dad and I had the opportunity to visit Katmai National Park in Alaska, and we went to Brooks Falls to see the bears fishing salmon. I was using this little Casio pocket camera to photograph the bears, but it wasn’t getting me what I wanted. And then I just said, “Hey, dad, can I borrow your camera?” And he didn’t really get it back.

Vishal Subramanyan

When I got back from the Alaska trip, I thought I’d have to wait for some other trip to continue my photography. But I soon realized there was so much great wildlife here in the Bay Area, and that this was where I could really specialize and tell stories about animals.

One of the first things I did was start photographing foxes — gray foxes and red foxes — in Coyote Hills park, and I also had a phase where I got into owls.

Vishal Subramanyan

Mid-2017 is when I first got into bobcats. I was out photographing owls in Sycamore Grove Park in Livermore, and a hiker said, “Oh, there’s a bobcat a down that way, it actually just killed a snake.” I spotted the bobcat along the row of a vineyard and got a photo where she was just a little speck in the frame. That was in April, and she was pregnant in that picture. So I returned in August, thinking that maybe she would have kittens around. I saw her cross the trail with a squirrel, and then, from a distance, I watched where she took that squirrel, and three little kittens came bounding out of a tree.

I named that first cat Notch because of a notch on her ear. She had kittens in the park every year, and over time, she grew to trust me. I ended up watching her over the course of four years until she disappeared. And that same year that I found Notch, I found Notch’s daughter, Blondie, who was also raising her with cats in the park.

After that, bobcats became an obsession of mine through high school and the early part of college. I would go every day after school, and I missed prom so I could go look for cats. I loved following these bobcat families, observing behaviors that I’d never seen before — and some that nobody had ever seen before. The bobcats felt almost human-like to me, in the sense that they all had their own individual personalities. I spent so much time with Notch that I truly felt like she was a friend.

Vishal Subramanyan

At the time, I felt a disconnect between my academic career and my photography. High school was just something I had do — and when I got it done, I would go to my bobcats. When it came time to decide which college I was going to go to, it was a toss-up between UC Berkeley and UCLA. And the reason I chose UC Berkeley is because I was heavily invested in the bobcats, and I knew if I went to UCLA, I wouldn’t be able to photograph them — and I wouldn’t be able to photograph anything because I wouldn’t have access to a vehicle. So I always say my college decision was primarily based on bobcats.

Vishal Subramanyan

My first year and a half at Berkeley was just like high school: I was doing my academics, getting the work done and then doing my photography. I started college in fall 2020, during the pandemic, so everything was online. On September 30th, 2020, I missed my class so I could go look for bobcats, and one of the photos I took of Blondie was later recognized by the London Natural History Museum Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards.

But a major shift happened for me when we started coming back on campus in fall 2021 and spring 2022. As I started connecting with all the amazing wildlife researchers at UC Berkeley, both in the environmental science department and in the biology department, I learned that there are so many people doing awesome research that I can help communicate through my photography. It helped me realize that I would like to pursue a career in environmental and wildlife storytelling, where I can take all this research and conservation that’s being done by academics or nonprofits and turn it into a presentable visual format that the public can understand and engage with. Realizing this helped me finally build a bridge between those two separate worlds.

Vishal Subramanyan

I think my skills as a naturalist immensely grew when I started my journey into camera trapping, which was something I picked up in early 2022. I initially started trying to photograph mountain lions, and now I am also working with Alan Shabel in the Department of Integrative Biology to photograph mountain beavers at Point Reyes.

When I started camera trapping, I knew nothing about how or where mountain lions moved, so I would just put my camera in a random field hoping to get something — and it never worked. So I started learning that mountain lions like to move through topographic pinch points, like canyons and ridge tops, and I also learned that they are known to leave scrapes on the ground where they mark their territory.

Courtesy of Vishal Subramanyan

And then, as I started working for the Department of Integrative Biology, I learned how to identify mountain beaver holes and which holes are fresh, based on how loose the soil is on the outside or the presence of fresh clippings outside the burrow.

I think that what photography really can do, more than anything, is draw people in. Photos can often capture the beauty in nature in a way that words might not be able to, and I think photography paired with interesting writing can really communicate messages in an effective way.

My goal right now is to start expanding more into videography and filmmaking, with the eventual goal of being able to produce wildlife documentaries. In the future, I’d love to film and photograph tigers in Siberia and their interactions with brown bears, because I think it’s fascinating that the tigers actually hunt brown bears. I’d also love to do more photography in India. I have a lot of family there, and when I visited last winter — for the first time in seven years — I was excited to photograph a black leopard.

But for now, I’m happy to focus on local stories, where I feel I can really have an impact.

Vishal Subramanyan

Subramanyan’s work photographing a rare badger at Point Reyes National Seashore was featured in National Geographic this week. His photos have also appeared in Bay Nature, the East Bay Times and the fall 2023 issue of Breakthroughs magazine, a publication of the UC Berkeley Rausser College of Natural Resources.

Exploring the art of creatively borrowing from other photographers is a nuanced skill that can significantly impact an artist’s work and growth. Recognizing and adapting the influences of others into one’s own photographic style not only broadens creative horizons but also deepens personal expression.

Coming to you from The Photographic Eye, this enlightening video takes a deep dive into the concept of “the art of thievery” in photography, as host Alex Kilbee shares his journey of incorporating elements from admired photographers into his own work. The discussion begins with an homage to Bob Carlos Clarke, highlighting the transformative influence of Clarke’s high-contrast, stylized imagery on the Kilbee’s approach to photography. This segment of the video underscores the importance of acknowledging inspirations while striving to infuse personal interpretations and nuances into one’s own work, illustrating how emulation can serve as a stepping stone to individuality.

The narrative then shifts to the impact of other photographers like Paul Strand and Obie Oberholzer on Kilbee’s creative process. Kilbee details how Oberholzer’s bold use of artificial light and adventurous approach to photography encouraged a more playful and experimental attitude towards his projects. Meanwhile, the exploration of Paul Strand’s work offers a different perspective, with his evocative landscapes and straightforward compositions inspiring a sense of place and atmosphere. These reflections offer valuable insights into how diverse influences can coalesce into a unique photographic voice, emphasizing the significance of being open to various styles and techniques. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Kilbee.

LaKeith Stanfield will be the voice of Ernest Cole, South Africa’s first Black freelance photographer, in an upcoming documentary about his life.

According to Variety, Oscar-nominated actor Stanfield has joined Raoul Peck’s project Ernest Cole: Lost and Found.

Stanfield has been cast as the voice of Cole — whose early images of Black life under apartheid shocked the world but whose later photographs of America were thought to be lost until 2017.

Stanfield, who has starred in Atlanta, and Get Out, will help bring the photographer’s words to life on screen.

Variety reports that Peck’s documentary production has the full collaboration of the Ernest Cole Family Estate, which is helmed by Cole’s nephew Leslie Matlaisane.

It has granted Peck exclusive access to the totality of the family’s archive, including images never previously seen by the public.

“I have long admired the peerless Raoul Peck’s singular body of work,” Stanfield says.

“I’m honored to have the opportunity to collaborate with him on ensuring Ernest Cole’s essential story is heard.”

A Photographer: Lost and Found

Born in 1940 in the Eersterust township, near Pretoria, South Africa, Cole witnessed the formalization of the apartheid regime growing up as a child.

When he was a teenager, Cole began working for Drum, a South African magazine geared toward Black readers.

As South Africa’s first Black freelance photographer, he was in a unique position to detail what was happening in his country. His early photography is known for revealing the horrors of apartheid to the world.

However, Cole’s work earned the ire of apartheid enforcers by capturing the human costs of the regime. At the age of 26, the South African authorities arrested Cole and labeled him a “banned person” for his photography.

In 1966, Cole fled South Africa and moved to the U.S. Cole’s House of Bondage was published the following year — the first and only book of those early South African photographs published during his lifetime.

However, throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, Cole traveled across America and photographed extensively in New York City, Chicago, and the American South.

Cole was fascinated by the ways that the country mirrored his homeland’s segregated culture. It was a critical time in the United States, with the Civil Rights Movement peaking and tensions rising after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

However, Cole never published these images of America in another book and his photographs were seemingly lost. Cole died in exile in New York City in 1990.

But according to The Atlantic, in 2017, a member of Cole’s family was mysteriously invited to Stockholm at the behest of a Swedish bank.

There, in three safety-deposit boxes, were more than 60,000 of his 35mm film negatives, many taken during Cole’s years in America.

In January this year, 260 of Cole’s images of that period were published in a book called The True America.

Peck’s film Ernest Cole: Lost and Found will tell Cole’s story through his writings, the recollections of those closest to him, and the images he captured with his camera.

The filmmakers hope the documentary will reintroduce “a pivotal Black artist to a new generation.”

Magnolia acquired North American rights from Range Media Partners and is planning a theatrical release for Ernest Cole: Lost and Found later this year.

Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos (left) and Wikimedia Commons (right).

[embedded content]

If you’ve ever found yourself struggling with the art of posing in photography, you’re not alone. Posing is challenging, requiring a delicate balance of personal connection, confidence, and creative expression. But like anything, with practice, you can get better at directing your clients and creating beautiful natural couple portraits.

In this video, wedding and portrait photographer Katelyn James goes through the ten most common red flags to avoid when posing couples.

Red Flag: Stiff and Rigid Poses

Solution: Embrace the concept that if a body part can bend, it should bend. Encourage your clients to avoid straight wrists, elbows, and knees, as this creates a more authentic and relaxed appearance.

Red Flag: Scary Eyes

Solution: Too much white in the eyes can make your subject look surprised or scared. Experiment with subtle changes in where they are looking, guiding your clients to achieve a natural and approachable gaze.

Red Flag: Awkward Legs

Solution: For clients with awkward-looking legs, especially those with longer limbs, suggest simple adjustments like crossing legs or crossing ankles. These small changes make anyone appear more natural.

Red Flag: Relying on Memorized Poses

Solution: Move away from a rigid set of memorized poses and embrace a more dynamic, flow-based approach. Learn to adapt and evolve your poses based on the unique characteristics of each couple, allowing for greater variety and creativity.

Red Flag: Clients Appear Larger Than Real Life

Solution: Be mindful of the relative positioning of your client’s head and hips. Ensure that the hips are not closer to the camera than the head, as this can create the illusion of a larger appearance. Guide your clients to lean slightly towards the camera to maintain a flattering perspective.

Red Flag: Not Adapting to Your Subject

Solution: Tailor your posing approach to the specific needs and characteristics of each couple. Consider factors such as height, build, and physical comfort, ensuring that your poses are both flattering and feasible for your clients.

Red Flag: Compressed Chin

Solution: Instead of directly addressing a double chin, instruct your clients to bring their foreheads towards the camera. This subtle adjustment helps alleviate the compression without making them self-conscious.

Red Flag: Compressed Arms

Solution: Avoid compressed arms by creating breathing room. Encourage natural spacing by having your clients pinch their dresses, place hands on hips, or hold a piece of hair – simple gestures that can open up the composition.

Red Flag: Shooting Up Client’s Nose

Solution: Pay attention to your shooting angle, especially if you are shorter than your clients. Elevate yourself or have your clients tilt slightly towards you to avoid shooting from underneath and creating unflattering perspectives.

Red Flag: Clients Are Unsure

Solution: Give clear and detailed instructions to make your clients feel more relaxed. Foster a positive and confident atmosphere during the session, ensuring that clients feel excited and assured without questioning their actions.

It feels like an awful lot of things to be thinking about, especially when you’re trying to engage your clients and get them feeling relaxed at the same time. However, I find that methodically checking through these details actually helps to relax your subjects, as they feel as though you are in control of the shoot.

Additionally, if you have the help of an assistant or stylist, you can enlist them to help you spot these red flags. It’s always better to fix things in camera than in post later.

If in doubt, do what I do and make your clients laugh. I find that usually relaxes them the best and helps them get the most natural-looking portraits. If they are too busy thinking about something else, they can’t think about how awkward they feel.