New work: Fading from View - a portrait series of endangered big cats

 FADING FROM VIEW

The increasing spread of humans around planet Earth is continuing to have a severe impact on the rest of the natural world. “Fading From View” is a portrait series of endangered or vulnerable “big cats”, whose numbers in the wild, for some species, have dwindled to just a few tens of animals.

The intent of the series was to conjure up the image of the last animal of a species literally fading from view, into extinction, as it walks away from you into a jungle or open plain, and as if these were some of the last ever portraits taken of that animal species.

The series was in part influenced by rare photographs of extinct animals such as the Quagga – a subspecies of zebra that lived in South Africa until the late 1880s, where it was hunted to extinction – and the thought that one day we might see the same happen for animals we’re all familiar with, such as the African Lion or Sumatran Tiger.