BG Wildlife Photographer of the Year Exhibition

Oxford Museum of Natural History to Sun 05/03/2000

This evocative exhibition, which exhibits the winners of the 1999 wildlife photographer of the year competition, has everything from orang-utans to geckos; pelicans to dugongs. The colourful array of world wildlife contains images that can be comic or thought-provoking, while many are shocking and often unexpected.

The winning series for the Eric Hosking Award is by Jamie Thom from South Africa, an evocative sequence of photographs of South African wildlife and landscapes. Leopard with Rising Moon is a prepossessing image of a sultry looking leopard under a thick African sky, while another shows a misty desert sunrise. Anup Shah from the UK wins the Gerald Durrell award with an appealing image of an infant orangutan, and runner-up Pete Atkinson with Dugong Feeding on Sea Grass gives us a magnificent and interesting view of this rarely photographed creature.

In other sections, Reed Reflections by Jan-Peter Lahall of Sweden show the surreal pattern formed by reeds on the top of a lake, 'like a message scrawled by nature' says the artist. Hedgehog with Shoe-scraper is a rather too cutesy image, as is Rock Hynax Lounging around Pool, a comic view of these plump lazy animals enjoying themselves. Look out for the Octopus In Shell by Constantinos Petrinos from Greece, a great image of an octopus athletically squeezing itself into a small shell for shelter.

The category called Wild Places sets out to show man and wildlife pitted against the immensity of their natural environment. Gunter Lenz of Germany has produced a beautiful image showing a group of Adélie penguins on the edge of a huge ice cliff in Antarctica. The tiny penguins look impossibly fragile against the white background, and they cheekily tempt fate by standing on the cliff edge. Among the photographs of landscapes, Beech Forest in Spring is particularly impressive, a deeply peaceful image of misty woodland that would calm anyone down. The weird Bull Kelp at Low Tide shows a strangely lunar seascape beneath an unusual pink spacey sky, skilfully capturing the elemental grandeur of raw nature. A mention too, of Delta Landscape, taken in Lapland, showing an ambiguous photograph that combines colour, texture and shape as if on an artist's palette.

The World In Our Hands is a shocking portrayal of man's abuse of his environment, with the disturbing Dead Foxes by William Osborn. This picture of foxes shot as predators in the English countryside and now covered with swarming flies and dried blood is testimony to sheer brutal reality in all its revolting truth. Karl Amman shows a parallel cruelty on the other side of the ocean, with an image of a slaughtered family of lowland gorillas in the Cameroon, who at first glance could be alive until you notice their lolling heads and blank eyes.

If you're passing, this exhibition is worth popping into. You never know, it might inspire you to enter this year's competition yourself.

Jane Labous 14/02/2000

For more information go to http://www.nhm.ac.uk/Wildphoto