The Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition returns to the Natural History Museum
Now in its 56th year, the annual wildlife photography exhibition (16 Oct-6 Jun 2021) attracted over 49,000 entries from professional and amateur photographers from 86 countries.
The museum’s executive director of science, Dr Tim Littlewood, says, ‘There has never been a more vital time for audiences all over the world to re-engage with the natural world.
‘We hope that this year’s exhibition will provide an opportunity for audiences to pause, reflect and ignite a passion of advocating for the natural world.’
The competition is divided into various categories, with the best 100 images displayed on lightboxes.
The winner
Sergey Gorshkov has been crowned the overall winner. He won the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2020 title for The Embrace, which shows a Siberian tigress hugging a Manchurian fir in Siberia, Russia.
In addition to the overall winner, there are highly commended images.
Highly commended
These include Matthew Maran’s The Rat Game – a young fox with a dead rat in its mouth. He shot the image on an allotment in north London.
Meanwhile, Hannah Vijayan’s The Perfect Catch shows a brown bear with a salmon in Alaska’s Katmai National Park.
As well as photos of wildlife, there are a number of sobering images designed to make us think about humankind’s impact on nature.
For example, Amazon Burning by Charlie Hamilton James shows a single tree amid a fire that is burning out of control. He took it in Maranhão state in the north east of Brazil.
The winning images were chosen for their creativity, originality and technical excellence by an international panel of industry experts.
Roz Kidman Cox is chair of the judging panel. She says, ‘Several of my favourite images from the competition – the ones that I can look at again and again – are among the commended pictures.
‘But what especially stands out are the images from the young photographers. They’re the next generation of image-makers passionate about the natural world.’
