FRAGILE WORLD
Photographer Colin Prior is best known for his stunning panoramic landscapes of the Scottish Highlands, but his latest project sees him focusing on something much smaller in scale but equally delicate: wild birds’ eggs
Iam mesmerised. The two computer screens in front of me update every few seconds in hypnotic sequence. They show a magnified image that resembles the surface of a planet taken from a space probe. The process continues in silence; I notice the tension of the three men involved.
Minutes later, it’s over, and the image zooms out to reveal not an alien landscape, but a perfectly photographed razorbill egg. But there’s another surprise. I have never seen a bird’s egg in such detail, with all the subtlety of its brown patterning, revealing a luminous, three-dimensional quality that has more in common with the work of a skilled fine artist than a product of nature.
Clustered – pre-coronavirus – around the screens in National Museums Scotland are Bob McGowan, senior curator in the Department of Natural Sciences; Derek Rattray, who owns the sophisticated equipment that has made this project possible, and photographer Colin Prior. All have huge smiles.
Colin Prior is one of the world’s great landscape photographers and someone I’ve been filming with for the past five years. When he first told me about his new project, working with birds’ eggs, I was unsure how it might
unfold. The thousands of people who admire Colin’s signature landscape photographs will probably feel this is an abrupt change of direction, but they’d be mistaken. Birds are a lifelong fascination for someone who grew up on Glasgow’s northern perimeter.
As a boy, Colin explored the hinterland where city meets countryside, initially inspired by
The Observer’s Book of Birds and its companion on birds’ eggs. But many of the birds he saw then have since vanished, victims of the increasing urbanisation of our landscape.
This habitat loss has driven Colin’s latest work and helped him secure access to the research collection at National Museums Scotland, which contains around 47,000 eggs. The collection includes eggs from species now extinct and whole clutches taken from the wild by obsessive collectors before the practice became illegal in 1954’s Protection of Birds Act.
THE EMBODIMENT OF NATURE
Appropriately, Colin has called this new body of work and accompanying book Fragile, wanting to relate these eggs to the habitat that produced them. So the razorbill’s egg is juxtaposed with the rugged grandeur of Thirle Door and the Stacks of Duncansby, east of
John o’Groats, in which habitat razorbills still thrive. Sometimes the colours of the eggs echo the landscape; on other occasions, such as the tawny owl, it relates to where they were laid. In the case of that iconic bird, the golden eagle, the markings on the egg seem to mimic the feathers of the bird itself. Other species, including the guillemot, show a big variation in patterns and colourings. All, seen in close up, are incredibly beautiful but some, such as the great auk, have an added poignancy because of humankind’s role in their extinction.
The overarching aim of this project is to breathe new life into these eggs and to reflect the complex relationship between landscape, nature and camera. It also reinforces Colin’s belief that birds are “the embodiment of nature and a world without them is a vision of the gates of hell”.
TESTS OF SKILL AND ENDURANCE
While the images featured in Fragile appear eternal, Colin talks of landscape photography being a contradiction: a scene that looks timeless is the result of just a few minutes, or even seconds, of transient light bathing the terrain in colours, texture and relief that may never occur in precisely the same way again.
There’s also the skill of rendering a threedimensional form into a two-dimensional image. Colin’s reputation was built on his panoramic images painstakingly shot on film. He’d spend days between the autumn and spring equinoxes camping out in the hills, often helped by his father, with both carrying rucksacks weighing over 23kg. In winter, ice-axe and crampons added more to the pack.
Though not given to mystical language, he talks of experiencing “an epiphany” when he stood on the summit of Ben Starav in the central highlands, looking down Glen Etive. The sun hadn’t appeared all day but suddenly broke through. “It was,” Colin recalls, “like a giant theatre lamp turning the landscape into something extraordinary.”
As Scotland’s best-known outdoorsman Cameron McNeish observes: “He’s defined wild Scotland for a generation, matching a photographer’s eye with the instincts of a mountaineer. He’s literally changed the way we look at our landscape.”
After 30 years at the top of his game, Colin’s work ethic is unstinting, so published almost simultaneously is another book, Karakoram – Ice Mountains of Pakistan. Years in the making and the result of many expeditions, it involved enduring his most demanding days in mountain environments. I witnessed his
dedication on the Baltoro Glacier, where danger from rockfall and crevasses was always present. Inspired by two great photographers – American Galen Rowell (1940–2002) and the pioneering Italian Vittorio Sella (1859–1943) – Colin was determined to produce definitive images illustrating how global warming has impacted on this inhospitable landscape.
The result captures the mountains’ austere grandeur with a technical and artistic perfection many aspire to, but few can equal.
At 63, Colin has no intention of slowing down. Building on the experience of photographing birds’ eggs for Fragile, his next big project will again involve a mixture of micro and macro, probably with insects. At its heart will be our relationship with a planet under threat and the importance of putting nature first. For someone so influential, he sums up his achievements with typical modesty: “I’ve been very lucky to follow my dream. Not many people can say that.”