Co-organised by the Natural History Museum and BBC Wildlife magazine, the annual Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition is a prestigious event worldwide. The winning and highly commended images make up an exhibition, which opens at the Natural History Museum in October, before touring the UK and 14 countries overseas, writes Sarah Cavanagh.
It?s important that the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition is presented and received as a serious art experience for a number of reasons. One of the most important of these is that wildlife photography is sometimes not as esteemed as other art forms, and so one of our missions is to encourage people to appreciate the artistry, creativity and hard work that goes into capturing these world-class images. As part of this commitment to establish the competition as a serious collection of art, the design and layout is changed from year to year. For example, the 2002 exhibition was based on a theme of abstracted, layered landscapes, and our in-house designers chose a colour palette of predominantly blue with selected areas defined in orange, broken up by textured panels of natural stone.
The standard of reproduction is obviously a crucial aspect of presenting a photography exhibition, and so we always work from the photographers? original transparencies. While prints are used for the UK tour, images are displayed on light boxes for the main exhibition at the museum. Displaying the images as backlit transparencies is an effective means of presentation, but it requires a substantial investment. Smaller tour venues often find it more cost-effective to display the images as prints.
One of my favourite parts of the exhibition is the caption that accompanies each image. It tells the story behind the picture in the photographer?s words, bringing the photograph to life and reinforcing any environmental messages. Because we use light boxes, the lighting in the gallery has to be kept quite subdued and we add to the tranquil atmosphere with an ambient soundtrack. As there are always more images than we have room to display, a special selection of the highly commended images are shown as a slide show in a seated area in the centre of the exhibition, which is always a popular spot for visitors to stop and reflect.
As this is an art exhibition, we wanted our promotional material to appeal to contemporary art followers, quite different to the museum?s general visitors. As a result, we now select particularly artistic photographs from the Composition and Form category as our main promotional images. This year we used an almost abstract picture of a quiver tree at sunset for our main poster campaign, very different from the cute images people might expect from a wildlife photography exhibition. Again, the marketing material was distributed to arts venues and publications, such as Time Out magazine, that fit the profile of our target audience ? people aged 25 to 34. This seems to have worked, as results from our visitor feedback survey have shown a majority of visitors are in this age range.
The exhibition is one of the Natural History Museum?s most popular temporary exhibitions. With careful thought to presentation, photographic exhibitions can help to diversify and expand the visitor audience ? and capture people?s imaginations.
Sarah Kavanagh is Competition Manager of Wildlife Photographer of the Year at the Natural History Museum. t: 020 7942 5156; f: 020 7942 5354; e: wildpress@nhm.ac.uk; w: http://www.nhm.ac.uk/wildphoto