The first thing that needs to be understood about Graham Springer is that he is not simply a “wildlife photographer”. Drawing from the photographers that inspire him, like Ansel Adams who believes that an image is “made” rather than captured, Springer self-identifies as a photographic artist. Rather than taking standard wildlife shots, he crafts creative and visually engaging images that have true artistic integrity.
What gives an image photographic integrity and credibility? Springer explains that in the creative world, wildlife photography has a bad reputation because of how achingly dull it can so often be from a technical and creative perspective. For him, an image of a wild animal cannot simply be taken, but must contain other creative photographic elements independent of subject matter that set it apart from the stock-standard photography seen in a lot of wildlife images.
Genesis
Springer was born in Zimbabwe but spent the majority of his youth in South Africa. His father was a civil engineer turned farmer, and the family moved around a lot before eventually settling on a farm in the Eastern Cape. He attended St. Andrews College in Grahamstown and then studied business science at the University of Cape Town.
At a very young age Springer began exploring photography, using his parents’ camera. When he was 12, his parents gave him an old Pentax Asahi, his first camera, which he has kept to this day. He made some money at school by photographing sport and other school events, learning the art of photography the old fashioned way – in the school’s dark room.
Early in 2014 Springer moved to South Africa’s Mother City, Cape Town, prior to which he spent 12 years living and working in northern Botswana. During his time in Botswana he worked mostly in documentary film production for various companies. Now, he focuses exclusively on his art.
Springer finds comfort in solitude and wide-open spaces. As a child, he dreamed of a career as a game ranger, though as he grew older his interest grew to include more creative fields. He describes his captivation with wildlife as subjects, as a natural evolution of his childhood goal, but says that his relationship with wild places and photography has deepened:
“I feel that I am starting to produce work that can ultimately help tell an important story. In the past 40 years we have lost 52% of the Earth’s wildlife. This is a staggering statistic. Rhino and elephant poaching is uncontrollable. There are 800 mountain gorillas left on Earth, all squeezed into a few pockets at the top of a couple of mountains.”
The artist asserts that he is under no illusion that his photographs of Africa’s remaining wilderness will have any consequential benefit, but feels that he is acknowledging and honouring the importance of a rapidly vanishing natural world.
Nostalgia
Having worked and lived for a lengthy period in one Africa’s last true wildernesses, Springer has had the privilege of witnessing some truly remarkable scenes. Some beautiful, some touching, some brutal. He says that it is impossible to single out one particular moment from the many but elaborates:
“One, by way of example, was being present at a wild dog den in Okavango Delta when the alpha female introduced the season’s pups to the pack for the first time. The pups are kept in an underground den for the first few weeks of their lives. On this afternoon, she ran around excitedly, yipping and snaking around the sleeping pack members and herded them all to the front of the den. She then peered down into the den and called the pups up into the light for the first time. They all emerged nervously and bunched around her legs as the rest of the pack crowded around, smelling and greeting the little ones.”
The subjects closest to Springer’s heart are African elephants and his passion for these creatures is clear in the hauntingly beautiful images he has taken of them. He holds all wildlife dear, enjoying time spent with wild dogs, finding leopards utterly beguiling and stating that it’s impossible not to like warthogs. In September 2014 he spent an hour with a gorilla family in Rwanda – a priceless experience that Springer says he definitely wants to repeat.
An encounter that Springer made no mention of in our interview but is surely one that amazed YouTube fanatics and documentary junkies alike, was his close brush with a lioness – or rather hers with him – while he was out photographing in the early hours in Botswana.
In the YouTube video by Earth Touch Springer explains that when he is photographing he tries to get as close to the ground as possible for a ground-level perspective. He was out of his vehicle working as the pride moved off around the back of the vehicle. One lioness took a different route right past Springer. As she slowly passed him, the box at his feet caught her interest and she approached, only to lose interest in the box when she noticed Springer.
Springer elaborates, “It’s obviously nerve wracking having a lioness’s head in your crotch so you literally have no choice but to stand dead still and wait it out. There was absolutely nothing I could do. So while this makes for an amusing clip, it’s pretty nerve wracking and is certainly not a situation that anybody wants to find themselves in. And the sense of relief when she finally walks off is quite evident.
“As wildlife photographers and cameramen we take calculated risks but we try and read behaviour and we try and read the situation. We never want to put ourselves in a situation where there’s a conflict between ourselves and a wild animal. You’re always going to be nervous if you’ve got a wild lioness standing, smelling your nether regions.”
Inspiration
Springer cannot choose a personal favourite out of his body of work. For him, each individual image evokes the precious memories associated with the moment it was shot and the individual image form part of a greater whole. All of his works available currently are from his time spent living in Botswana and he sees them as a collective body of work, each piece as valuable as the next but the whole is greater than the sum of all the parts.
The artist is inspired by beautiful art and clever design, film and theatre and describes himself as a visual person gaining inspiration from anything with aesthetic value. Aside from the previously mentioned landscape photographer Ansel Adams, Springer says that he looks up to Sebastiao Salgado who’s work he says is magnificent and powerful. As a young photographer, he found himself inspired by the more abstract images by Frans Lanting and now cites Sir David Attenborough as an obvious icon for anyone involved in making imagery of the natural world.
To date, Springer has held three exhibitions, all in Johannesburg in 2009, 2011 and 2013 respectively. He has begun work on an extended project to photograph the last great wildernesses of Africa, spending time in Namibia and early in 2015 he will be spending some time in the Serengeti and Tanzania.
“It is a long term project and something I’d like to do in a way that hasn’t been done before. I’m also working on some projects that don’t involve wildlife. But these are still developing,” says Springer. Some of the images shown here are previews of Springer’s new work that he has not yet released.
Africa owes a thanks to people like Springer, who are not only immortalising its beauty for future generations but also attempting to bring its fragility to the surface and attempting to make a difference. Exquisite art may not be difficult to come by, but exquisite art with a purpose? Priceless.
