Steve Bloom
From exotic wildlife to South Africa in the apartheid era, Steve Bloom has shot it all. His aim is to create images that affect others, he tells David Clark
Steve Bloom is a pro wildlife photographer who shoots images that have a powerful and emotional
impact. His work often highlights the link between animals and people; anyone who looks at his images of primates would be moved by the close similarity between their behaviour and ours. He’s just as likely to photograph a hippo beset by a pack of hungry lions as appealing penguins leaping off an iceberg.
While much of his work has focused on wildlife, he started out documenting everyday life in his native South Africa and returned to the subject for his landmark book Living Africa in 2008.
Bloom will be speaking at Wilkinson Cameras’ Digital Splash 16 (details on page 71), but we met up with him before, and in this look back on his life and career to date, he started by talking about that early work and the impact of his early years in the repressive, segregated society of apartheid-era South Africa…
What first sparked your interest in photography?
Growing up in South Africa we didn’t have television, it was banned by the government. So we got hold of copies of Life magazine and I used to love the
photographs. I remember seeing pictures by John Dominis of a leopard in a tree against a sunset. I was mesmerized by that. Then I remember the pictures of John F Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. Horrific though they were, I was struck by the power of photography and I realized from a young age how photography can emotionally stir and awaken people to things that go on in the world.
How did apartheid-era South Africa affect you?
My family had always taken an antiapartheid stance, and when I was eight years old my father fled South Africa and went into exile because of it. We also had family friends who were persecuted and imprisoned for their opposition to apartheid. We had a materially privileged life but it was a very traumatic time to live in South Africa, and to see what was going on around me. So when I was in my early 20s, I felt a compulsion to pick up the camera and photograph it. I was working for a publishing company as a gravure retoucher, then in my spare time I’d go out and take photographs. Making images really helped me deal with the times we were living in.
What led you to do it?
I think it’s a compulsion to create something that affects others. It doesn’t matter if you’re a poet, musician, painter, writer or even a chef, it’s the same drive. I was doing it to capture something of the essence of what people were experiencing at that time in South Africa’s history.
When did you leave South Africa?
I became so uncomfortable with
I realized how photography can emotionally stir and awaken people
apartheid that eventually, in 1977, I put my pictures in a suitcase with my camera and clothes and flew to England. I was initially given a work permit but was later given political asylum because the photographs were critical of the South African government.
How did you manage to make a living in the UK?
I initially moved to Bristol and worked for a wallpaper and packaging printer for three years. Then I went to London where I learned darkroom techniques for transparency retouching and eventually set up my own business. I took on a partner, Phil Jones, and we ran a retouching company. In 1989, we got one of the very first workstations in the UK. It was a computer with a 1GB hard drive and we both had to re-mortgage our houses to pay for it. It was hugely risky, but we were offering advertising agencies the sort of things you can do with Photoshop today. When Photoshop came on board it effectively killed our business. The workstation ended up in a skip.
How did you make the transition to pro photographer?
In 1993, after apartheid had been abolished, I made my first trip back to South Africa. As part of the trip, my wife Kathy and I went to a game park. I had hired a Canon EOS-1 film camera and a bunch of lenses. I took a lot of pictures, including one of a charging rhinoceros, which I photographed on the first day. It was beginner’s luck! When I came back I put them in the Planet Earth Pictures photo library, where they started to earn a very good income. Our business was faltering at the time, so I very quickly changed career.
Were you focused on shooting images for sale?
We needed to make a living from it, so I had to shoot pictures that I knew would sell, but I would also shoot ones that were aesthetically pleasing. I got into the photo library business at a very lucrative time, before digital photography came along. Most people were still shooting on film because digital cameras couldn’t capture fast enough or with enough pixels. In stock pictures at that time, there was a shortage of supply and a great deal of demand.
How did you capitalize on that?
Getty bought Planet Earth Pictures so we made a bit of a bold move and decided to set up our own photo library, Steve Bloom Images, to sell direct. It was quite a challenge, because Getty was well established and could make a huge number of sales. But I decided I wanted to produce books, which meant I had to
have absolute control of the rights to my future photography work.
What were your early photo projects about?
The first was called In Praise of Primates and was about our closest genetic relatives. It took two years to shoot and was published by Ludwig Könemann in 1997. It was published in ten languages and with 250,000 copies as a first print run, which for a photography book was extremely unusual. Then after I’d done that I thought I’ve got to go to all the continents in the world and photograph a wide variety of animals. It was a ten-year project. This book, Untamed, was also published in ten languages.
What motivates your work?
I’ve spoken about photography as a business, but from an emotional point of view there’s the importance of making people aware of different cultures and wildlife, and this whole artistic drive. I’ve also wanted to use photography to try to engender an awareness of sentience in animals – to try to blur the lines between them and us, and between different kinds of people. Where there’s divisiveness it can lead to one group of people destroying another, or the destruction of wildlife habitats because people don’t see or recognize the rights of animals living in these habitats. To me it’s all the same.
What was your first camera?
I took my first photographs at the age of eight, when I started using a Box Brownie. Then later, when I was documenting apartheid in the ’70s, I used a Canon FTB. It was a beautiful camera, so simple and so solid. Mine was stolen years ago, but I saw a second-hand one in
a shop the other day and I snapped it up. This one was in much better condition than my own, which was battered but it worked. It had the scars of battle on it, which was wonderful.
Which Canon bodies do you currently use?
I use the Canon EOS-1DS Mark III. It’s a great camera and a wonderful tool. I have two, which I bought in 2008. You can’t shoot video, which is a downside, but I’ve found I need to do one or the other, and it’s kind of difficult to switch. I also don’t want to have that choice thrown at me all the time. Too much choice can almost inhibit creativity. It’s probably time I upgraded, but it still works beautifully.
What are the main lenses in your camera bag?
I have the Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8l, the
24-70mm f/2.8l, the 70-200mm f/2.8l, the 300mm f/2.8l and the 500mm f/4l. I also take along an EF 100-400mm as a back-up. Then if I lose a body and a lens, at least I’ve got something that’s close. If you spend a lot of money and time getting somewhere, you don’t want to not be able to take photographs. I use primes where possible. I do notice the difference because I’m a stickler for detail.
Do you use remotes or drones?
No. I can’t even use the LCD screen for composing a picture. I have to put the viewfinder to my eye and see what I’m doing. Then I have to make the decision when to press the shutter. Drones and remotes are a scattergun approach. You might get some good pictures but it’s not really creative. It’s like throwing something into the wind. If you do that enough times you might get some great pictures, but I believe in the hand-eye co-ordination and the brain saying, okay, let’s press the shutter. Some pictures from drones and remotes are really interesting, but for me the artistic process is about actually making the work yourself.
Is pro photography today all about having multiple income streams?
The stock photography business remains my primary source of income, but it has been declining as it has across the board. Everyone is taking photos and people have got compact cameras that produce images of the kind of quality I needed a ton of equipment and film to shoot. In terms of wildlife, more and more people are going on safari and these pictures can be taken quickly and easily. Then there are outlets which will sell them very cheaply, so obviously that’s had an effect on stock work. So as a photographer you do need multiple streams.
Was Living Africa, from 2008, one of your most important books?
After years in which I had become known as a wildlife photographer, I wanted to re-establish my identity and rediscover the process of photographing people. I did things like going 3km underground to photograph gold mines in South Africa, and met very remote tribes in Ethiopia. The book is a testament to the incredible diversity of life itself in Africa and it was very exciting and rewarding to do that.
What are the biggest changes you’ve seen in your profession?
It’s got to be the transition from film to digital. It’s massively reduced the costs of taking photographs. I used to spend £3000 on film and processing on every trip. The downside is that a lot of people press the shutter before they’ve thought about what they’re photographing. People take a photograph and then they’re busy studying the back of their camera, but something could be happening that they’re missing. Then, from a business point of view, there are now so many images that it’s sometimes quite hard to find the great ones. They’re drowning in a sea of billions and billions of photographs.
What’s been your favourite place to photograph and why?
I have this passion for elephants, so I love going to Savuti in Botswana. It’s a place that’s not overcrowded with tourists, it
can be pretty quiet. Elephants come to the water hole and you see the interaction between them. Then lions come down. Lions actually hunt elephants around there, so there was huge tension between them. The elephants would chase them away. There’s a dryness about the area, with the quintessential African dust I can feel in my nostrils that takes me back to the continent of my childhood. It’s just a wonderful experience to be there.
Is it harder to make a living as a photographer today?
I’m going to be absolutely honest and say that if I was coming into this afresh now, instead of in 1993, it would be a thousand times more difficult to make a living. I certainly think people need to consider very carefully having alternative income streams. It’s a question of multi-tasking and doing multiple things. I was in at the right time when I started. I’m 63 now, and I did well enough out of it to create a reasonable pension for myself, and I feel privileged and incredibly lucky.
What’s been your greatest moment as a photographer?
It’s got to be the moment my first book was published. I saw a warehouse full of them and they’d just finished printing the last one. I’d had a book published, which had always been a dream, and I knew the photographs would then reach a wide audience. For me, the real reward of photography is reaching my audience.