TRAVEL PHOTOGRAPHY BOOKS
TWO WORLDS: ABOVE AND BELOW THE SEA
by David Doubilet
(Phaidon, £39.95) David Doubilet (born in 1946) reckons he has spent more than 27,000 hours photographing in water since he first put his Brownie Hawkeye camera in an anaesthetist’s rubber bag at the age of 12. It wasn’t until 1990, though, that he felt he’d achieved his first successful merging of two worlds, air and water, with a picture of a stingray gliding through sand, sea and – apparently – clouds. Here, he gathers his most telling “half-and-half ” pictures of two inextricably linked worlds, “to bear witness to the wonder, the beauty, the loss and, I hope, the resilience of our oceans”.
NIGHT ON EARTH by Art Wolfe (Earth Aware, £35)
Wolfe’s book opens with Ruskin Hartley, executive director of the International Dark-Sky Association, reminding us of the damage we’re doing with light pollution. It closes with images of blazing skyscrapers in Tokyo and Manhattan, of streaming headlights and tail lights on the Champs-Elysées. In between, everywhere from Brazilian wetland to Indian market, it’s an invitation to move through a lower-wattage world, and enjoy the simple pleasure of watching it get dark.
PORTRAIT OF HUMANITY: VOLUME 3
(Hoxton Mini Press, £22.95) Portrait of Humanity is an international award designed to show that “there is more that unites us than sets us apart”. This year’s collection brings us a sweaty-faced anaesthetist from intensive care in London, friends hovering either side of a door in Switzerland, and a woman worried by the latest news in Japan. But among the 200 images are many in which people are touching each other, communicating in a way that, as Otegha Uwagba puts it in her introduction, “transcends language barriers and… binds us together in its universal capacity to provide comfort”.
LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE YEAR: COLLECTION 14
(Ilex Press, £30) Fog and mist feature often this year in an ever-dependable showcase for the best images of Britain. So, too, do references in the photographers’ notes to first trips and walks after lockdown and to looking closer to home. The Nuba Survival, a sculpture in a field in Checkendon, south Oxfordshire, by the local artist John Buckley, shows two skeletons locked in an embrace. It’s a memorial of the civil war in Sudan, but to the photographer Alison Fairley it spoke of Covid-19 and of “those who are broken and those who are desperately seeking hugs”.
INDIA
by Harry Gruyaert
(Thames & Hudson, £45)
“I don’t know anything about India – it’s too vast and too complex,” Gruyaert says modestly. But he responds to it magnificently with a camera. Gruyaert (born in Antwerp in 1941 and a member of the Magnum agency since 1981) has been visiting India since the 1970s, but this is his first book of the images he has made there. Whether on roadside or riverside, of crowds or individuals, they’re sensuous in colour, striking in contrast; his way, he says, of “bearing witness to a mystery”.
WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE YEAR: PORTFOLIO 31
(Natural History Museum, London, £25)
This year’s competition saw a record number of entries, 50,490, from 30 countries. The “big pictures” are here – among them one of a young white-tailed kite reaching towards its hovering father to grab a live mouse – but the naturalist Chris Packham, in his introduction, senses the impact of lockdowns: “A skating fly, craneflies entangled in ecstasy, a cuddled bat, newts in coitus – little treasures from the more private lives of humans and the tiny things they found when their lives shrank and their world wasn’t so wide any more.”