Wednesday, 30 April 2014 09:54

John Beatty's Wild Vision reviewed

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When you've spent three decades travelling the world, seeking out wilderness and adventure, you're pretty much guaranteed to see some inspirational sights.  Wild Vision is the accumulation of 30 years of such travel from John Beatty, captured for ever in a jaw dropping collection of photographs. From bluebells in the Peak District's Hope Valley to the deserts of Namibia Wild Vision is a celebration of the Natural World in all its glory, but more than that the pictures together tell a story that's far more than the sum of its constituent parts.

 

In the hands of John Beatty the camera ceases to be a "piece of equipment" but becomes an extension of the man himself; his eyes and mind mirrored in a stunning collection of prints that pull at the senses. The individual shots are more than just a moment in time, they're inspirational in depicting our world as nature intended. The photographs don't sit there inanimately on the pages, they jump out at you with their clarity, their focus and their atmosphere that rather than looking at them you can almost feel them. They have the power to draw emotions from the viewer to the point that viewing them becomes almost a religious experience.

Wild Vision Book Cover John Beatty1

Divided into 7 main chapters Wild Vision takes you on a journey through the Himal, Africa, the High Arctic, Northern Forests, The Grand Canyon and John's home in Britain taking in Origins and Species along the way.  They are, as Jim Perrin so eloquantly says in the Foreword, " the work of a man who knows his subject through and through and has given it his most painstaking attention through decade after decade of increasingly familiarity and knowledge". Together with the short essays that accompany them the pictures form a record of our planet like no other. King Penguins vie with images of a Tamang girl in the Himalaya, Zebras in the Serengetti and bleached Caribou remains in the Arctic for attention. The colours of the New Hampshire forests in autumn compete with the bleakness of pack ice in the Arctic and the Deadvlie of the Naukluft desert in a compettion of sensory stimulation. Each chapter tells a story of the lands, the wildlife and the peoples of our planet, putting them into context while also telling a personal story of the author's journey, the words complementing rather than distracting from the images. This is not an exercise in apertures and shutter speeds, it's a story of one man's jealousy inducing relationship with our Earth.

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There are other collections of inspiring photographs, some more consistent in terms of award winning quality, but there's something different about Wild Vision. Where other collections sit idly by on the bookshelf in the month since Wild Vision landed on the mat it's rarely left the coffee table. It's not a book to be left alone, it's a book to be seen; to be digested and shared, to both inspire and sadden. Twenty years from now it'll probably still be on the coffee table, dog eared and thumbed to destruction, still depicting the world as it is in our dreams and still reaching into hearts and souls. To be able to do that for the measly cost of £25 is almost as remarkable as the pictures and book itself.

Emperor Penguins2



Note: This article was restored from the archives. It's published creation date is inaccurate.

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