Wildlife photographers Angela and Jonathan Scott will donate a portion of the proceeds of sales from Sacred Nature: Wild Africa at Edition ONE Gallery to WildEarth Guardians.
While Angela and Jonathan Scott are known primarily for photographing big cats, their larger body of work encompasses wildlife in general, as inSound of Thunder.
Roaring At The Dawn is one of the limited edition prints available at the exhibition, Sacred Nature: Wild Africa, which runs through August 9 at Edition ONE Gallery.
Angela and Jonathan Scott are known primarily for photographing big cats, capturing images such as Night Walker.
Wildlife photographers Angela and Jonathan Scott will donate a portion of the proceeds of sales from Sacred Nature: Wild Africa at Edition ONE Gallery to WildEarth Guardians.
Jonathan and Angela Scott
While Angela and Jonathan Scott are known primarily for photographing big cats, their larger body of work encompasses wildlife in general, as inSound of Thunder.
Roaring At The Dawn is one of the limited edition prints available at the exhibition, Sacred Nature: Wild Africa, which runs through August 9 at Edition ONE Gallery.
Decades before the BBC nature documentary series Big Cat Diary, there was just a young zoologist with an improbable dream. Jonathan Scott, at the time a recent graduate of Queen’s University in Belfast in Northern Ireland, wanted to spend his life documenting the wildlife in Africa.
He was sure of his path; but first, he had to convince a skeptical professor.
“He just looked at me with fatherly concern and said, ‘By any chance, do you have a private income?’” Scott says, now a half-century later. “He said, ‘That’s the Great British Pastime. You’d better think about getting a job.’ What was wonderful was about 30 years later, when Big Cat Diary became a big international TV success, he wrote to me having seen it and said, ‘The best thing you ever did was not listen to the advice of old men.’”
Scott, one half of a famed photography team with his wife, Angela, has published dozens of books over his decades as a wildlife photographer.
And while he and Angela are best known for their Big Cat Diary work — a show that followed the lives of lions in Kenya’s Maasai Mara National Reserve — they’ve taken on a much larger task in their second act.
The Scotts founded the Sacred Nature Initiative, a program that reconnects people to the natural world to enlist them as stewards of conservation, wherever they live. Both of them will attend a reception for an exhibit of their work on Friday, July 5, at Edition ONE Gallery, and they also plan to donate a portion of the proceeds to WildEarth Guardians, a Santa Fe-based conservation organization.
“The whole idea was to say to people, ‘You need to realize that nature isn’t just a choice. It’s a must. You cannot survive without it,’” Jonathan Scott says. “Unless you go and experience nature, you won’t care about it. You won’t bother when it starts to go down the tube. What we’re seeing now is wild places and wild creatures are being pushed off the planet by the human population. And it’s not just about the big cats. It’s not just about Africa. As Angie always says, ‘What you really need to do is to try to protect landscapes.’ Big chunks of land because lions will breed like flies if they get the chance.”
Scott, an engaging conversationalist who quotes author and mythology specialist Joseph Campbell and biologist E.O. Wilson more than once during a 50-minute chat, says that his African adventure was not a straight line to success.
When he drove from London to Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1974, he didn’t know much about photography. He’d purchased a Canon camera shortly before embarking on the four-month, 8,000-mile journey, but he also made the mistake of buying a Tamron lens and adapter that he didn’t know how to use. By the time he’d arrived in Kenya, he got the bad news.
“I took my little black-and-white contact sheets all excited into the photo shop,” he says of his first photos. “Three days later, I walked through the door, and you should’ve seen the look on the guy’s face. He just covered his eyes and said, ‘I’m so sorry.’ I said, ‘What are you sorry about?’ He said, ‘Your pictures, they are as black as night.’ … The adapter allowed me to adapt the lens to the body. But what it didn’t do was allow me to set the automatic settings and the automatic aperture. So I was shooting everything at f/22 for months. I got a few camels from North Africa, and the rest of it was black.”
Despite the disappointment, he sold his one-way ticket to Australia and stayed in Africa — and he’s never really left.
Angela Scott’s path to photography complements her husband’s. She was born in Egypt and grew up in Tanzania, where the Serengeti was her backyard; she’s been interested in conservation all her life.
Jonathan says he learned much of what he knows about lighting and atmospheric effects from his wife. And Angela says their partnership works because they’re so different and they truly enjoy the time they spend together in the field.
Angela and Jonathan Scott are known primarily for photographing big cats, capturing images such asPrince of Cats.
“We’re polar opposites. Jonathan is very gregarious and loves to talk. I’m very quiet ,” she says. “When I met Jonathan ... I didn’t know anything about science. I just loved being in nature. It was a sort of a perfect partnership, because I love photography and illustrating the natural world. I could stay out all day, every day. And then Jonathan’s a wonderful storyteller.”
The story he’s telling these days is focused on the ways the world has changed. Decades ago, when Jonathan started surveying the wildlife at Maasai Mara, there were only five camps of naturalists and photographers. Now, decades later, there are 200 of them, and more than 300,000 people come to Kenya per year to visit the preserve.
The Scotts have a permanent base at Maasai Mara, but they’ve also spent time traveling the world. They’ve been to Antarctica 20 times, and their photos from their worldwide travels are the subject of their latest books.
The Scotts published Sacred Nature: Life’s Eternal Dance (HPH Publishing) in 2016 highlighting their work in Africa, and in 2021, they followed with Sacred Nature 2: Reconnecting People to Our Planet (HPH Publishing). A forthcoming volume in the series will be titled Sacred Nature: Life’s Journey, Our Story.
Interestingly, they both consider their work collectively, no matter who presses the shutter.
“I think that’s where we’ve been so lucky, because if you think about photography, it’s sort of selfish,” Jonathan says. “You know, ‘This is my project. These are my photos.’ Yet we’ve managed to collaborate as a team. Angie says, ‘The best relationships are built on a competition of generosity,’ and we’re always looking out for each other. If I see a shot, I might say, ‘My God, that’s an amazing shot.’ And she may say, ‘You’re in a better position. You’ve got the wide-angle lens.’ Two for the price of one takes you a lot further.”
If you’ve seen Big Cat Diary — or even if you haven’t — the Scotts want viewers to know that the truth is much more incredible than what comes from the camera. The animals really are right in front of them, and they’d often spend all day with them; but so are other cars jockeying for position, and sometimes, Angela Scott says, people seem to lose perspective.
“We’ve seen a lot of complete disconnect,” she says of her fellow humans. “People will come from a city, and they come into the natural world, and they don’t really see it. They just want to say, ‘I’ve been there.’ You can see crazy things like the wildebeest when they cross the river, and you’ve got calves breaking their legs and animals being eaten by crocodiles. It’s life and death for them, and you have people on the bank with bottles of champagne and their selfie pictures smiling to the camera. Behind them, animals are dying.”
Santa Fe is a special stop for the Scotts — their son, David, and daughter-in-law, Tori, live here — and it’s a perfect place to do their outreach. Everywhere they go, they tell the people they meet that the idea of a pure wilderness doesn’t really exist anymore.
Antarctica has shown traces of bird flu, they say, despite being one of the least developed places on the Earth. The Scotts want to use the platform they’ve developed over decades to rally people to take better care of our backyards. That’s the mission that takes them to the literal ends of the earth, and it never fails to surprise them how their reputation precedes them.
“We are still living off the fat of the proceeds of Big Cat Diary, and it was such a phenomenal hit with audiences that people still approach us every once in a while, even in the oddest of places,” Jonathan says. “You might be climbing to the top of Machu Picchu and you’re standing there, and someone will say, ‘Hang on a minute, aren’t you that bloke from Big Cat Diary?’ Then we all have a laugh and try not to fall off the cliff.”
