The "top 40 nature photographs of all time," as selected by the International League of Conservation Photographers (ILCP), will be auctioned by Christie's International on April 22 in honor of Earth Day.
Proceeds will be divided among the following environmental organizations: Conservation International, Oceana, Natural
Resources Defense Council and the Central Park Conservancy.
The collection spans over 100 years of photography and features iconic images of
nature in the 20th and 21st centuries. The photographers include Ansel Adams,
National Geographic Magazine Editor-in-Chief Chris Johns, Pulitzer
Prize-winning landscape photographer Jack Dykinga, and underwater
documentarian Brian Skerry.
For the judging, ILCP members were asked to consider factors such as aesthetics, uniqueness, historical and
scientific significance, or contribution to conservation efforts.
“It was no easy task, selecting just forty images from the incredible
nominations submitted to us by some of the world’s greatest nature
photographers, but it was a tremendous honor for the ILCP to be asked to
take the lead on this challenging project,” said ILCP Executive
Director Justin Black.
“No doubt, there are other notable and worthy photographs that could
have secured a spot in the Top 40 gallery,” Black added, “but this
diverse cross section clearly demonstrates the power of photographs to
educate, enlighten, inspire, and stir us into action to protect our
limited natural resources.”
ILCP President and photographer Cristina Mittermeier said, “One of the
brightest contributions of photography to the preservation of special
landscapes and creatures around the world is that images are able to
shed light on some of the darkest, most remote corners of our planet.
I’ve seen first-hand how photographs like these arrest the eye, invite
reflection, provoke emotion, and become a shared experience that gifts
us with a larger vision of the world.”
July 2006, northern tip of Baffin Island.
Its image mirrored in icy water, a polar bear travels submerged–a
tactic often used to surprise prey. Scientists fear global warming could
drive bears to extinction sometime this century.
Australian sea lions play in the sea grass beds off Little Hopkins
Island Australia
"A group of Australian sea lions relax and frolic in a
sea grass meadow near Little Hopkins Island South Australia. They are a
curious species that nuzzle the lens and playfully pull on fin and
mask straps. While I was photographing them the leader of the group
stood straight up and looked around and then swam straight and fast for
the beach with the entire group following. The sea was still and quiet and something
told us that maybe we should leave too and we climbed into our boat
just as a great white shark came into view. The Australian sea lion is
one of the rarest and most endangered pinnipeds in the world."- David
Doubilet
Australian sea lions play in the sea grass beds off Little Hopkins
Island Australia.."A group of australian sea lions relax and frolic in a
sea grass meadow .near Little Hopkins Island South Australia. They are a
curious species .that nuzzle the lens and playfully pull on fin and
mask straps. While I .was photographing them the leader of the group
stood straight up and .looked around and then swam straight and fast for
the beach with the .entire group following. The sea was still and quiet
and something told .us that maybe we should leave too and we climbed
into our boat just as .great white shark came into view. The Australian
sea lion is one of the .rarest and most endangered pinniped in the
world."..- David Doubilet
Rock and Cloud, Eastern Sierra, California, 1976 Galen Rowell
Galen
Rowell (1940-2002) was a master of incorporating fleeting qualities of
natural light in compelling compositions. He saw this splendidly
illuminated cirrus cloud floating quickly on the wind while climbing one
evening in the Buttermilk region of California's Eastern Sierra Nevada.
Rather than simply capturing an image of the cloud out of context with
the place, Galen wished to incorporate a sense of the boulder-strewn granite landscape around him. He imagined a composition that paired the
cloud with a strongly graphic silhouette, and traversed the rugged
landscape to find a foreground subject in a suitable position to
photograph against the sky while the cloud passed overhead. He waited
only thirty seconds after setting up his tripod-mounted Nikon before the
cloud floated through the perfect position.
Rock and Cloud, Eastern Sierra, California, 1976 Galen Rowell. .Galen
Rowell (1940-2002) was a master of incorporating fleeting qualities of
natural light in compelling compositions. He saw this splendidly
illuminated cirrus cloud floating quickly on the wind while climbing one
evening in the Buttermilk region of California's Eastern Sierra Nevada.
Rather than simply capturing an image of the cloud out of context with
the place, Galen wished to incorporate a sense of the boulder-strewn
granite landscape around him. He imagined a composition that paired the
cloud with a strongly graphic silhouette, and traversed the rugged
landscape to find a foreground subject in a suitable position to
photograph against the sky while the cloud passed overhead. He waited
only thirty seconds after setting up his tripod-mounted Nikon before the
cloud floated through the perfect position.
For centuries, polar bears have gathered along the Western
shores of Hudson Bay during late October and early November waiting for
the bay to freeze. Here at Cape Churchill the land extends far out into
the bay and is one of the first places the bay begins to freeze. When
the ice grows solid, the polar bears move out onto the ice where they
will spend the winter hunting for their main diet of ringed and bearded
seals. While the pregnant females leave the bay and head inland
thirty-five to forty miles. There they will dig dens, and the young will
be born in December and January. Cape Churchill is the largest
gathering of polar bears on earth. Here the relatively solitary bears
come together and socialize waiting for the temperatures to drop and the
ice to freeze. As the winter storm approached the cape, during near
whiteout conditions, two adult polar bears test each other's strength in
what is known as play fighting. From the time polar bears come out of
their dens in March and April, cubs, like most animals, play fight. Male
polar bears continue to play fight into adult hood. It not only keeps
them fit and establishes a hierarchy, but to any viewer it is obviously
something the bears enjoy. Polar bears are my favorite mammal to
photograph, and this image titled "Polar Dance" with its almost
human-like gestures of dance and the mood created by the blowing snow is
my most favorite image I've made. -Tom Mangelsen
RESERVED
Mist, Rock Island Bend, Franklin River, Southwest Tasmania,
Australia."..Photograph Peter Dombrovskis copyright Liz
Dombrovskis….This iconic Photograph was instrumental in allowing the
rivers to run free…First published in "The Australian Newspaper" prior
to the 1983 Australian Federal Elections with the slogan."Could you
vote for a party that would destroy this?"..There was public
outrage…At 10.40 am on 1st July, 1983, The High Court of Australia…
Mist, Rock Island Bend, Franklin River, Southwest Tasmania,
Australia
Photograph Peter Dombrovskis copyright Liz
Dombrovskis
This iconic photograph was instrumental in allowing the
rivers to run free. It was first published in "The Australian Newspaper" prior
to the 1983 Australian Federal Elections with the slogan: "Could you
vote for a party that would destroy this?" There was public
outrage…The rivers still
run free.
Petrified Sand Dunes and Reflection, Paria Canyon – Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness,
Arizona
Pulitzer-prize winning photojournalist and landscape
photographer Jack Dykinga made this photograph as part of a campaign to
create National Monuments in both the Paria Canyon and Escalante Canyon
drainages. He had tried on six separate occasions to make this image
following seasonal rains, dissatisfied each time with the quality of the
reflections in the standing water. His final effort paid off after
driving south from Salt Lake City and arriving near Paria Canyon around
midnight. Dykinga camped at the mouth of one of the side canyons and
began hiking in around 3:30am in order to arrive on location in time for
dawn and calm water. The Abrams publishing house rewarded the effort
in Dykinga's book Stone Canyons of the Colorado Plateau (1996), creating
a cover free of any type because publisher Lou Gotlieb so loved the
image. Following the successful creation of the Grand
Staircase-Escalante National Monument and Vermilion Cliffs National
Monument, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt sent Dykinga a letter of
thanks, noting the book's help in raising public awareness of these
special places.
at Dawn, Galapagos Islands, 1984. Giant tortoises in pond, Geochelone
elephantopus, Alcedo Volcano, Galapagos Islands
"The Galápagos Islands
provide a window on time. In a geologic sense, the islands are young,
yet they appear ancient. The largest animals native to this archipelago
are giant tortoises, which can live for more than a century. These are
the creatures that provided Darwin with the flash of imagination that
led to his theory of evolution. Immutable as the tortoises seem, they
were utterly vulnerable to the buccaneers and whalers who took them by
the thousands in the last two centuries. But one population eluded
them. Inside the Alcedo volcano on Isabela Island, an earlier era
lingers. This caldera is sealed off from the outside world by steep
lava slopes that rise to 3,860 feet on the equator. It was not until
1965 that an Ecuadorian biologist found a way down inside and discovered
a world where giant tortoises roamed in primordial abundance. This
group had presumably never seen humans. They hadn't seen many more
when I entered the time capsule of the caldera. For one memorable week,
I lived among the tortoises of Alcedo. Photography one morning was one
of those precious experiences where I could be part of a scene rather
than a distant observer. The tortoises were resting in a pond as soft
mist mingled with sulfur steam from nearby fumaroles and dust from an
erupting volcano to the west, and I was able to create an image that
evokes the era when reptiles dominated life on land."- Frans Lanting.
Photography
Doomed by a gill net, a thresher shark in Mexico's Gulf of California
is among an estimated 100 million sharks killed yearly for their fins.
They add to the devastating global fish catch: nearly 100 million
tons.
2005
Water Lilies, Nymphaea nouchali, Okavango Delta, Botswana
"One of the
greatest challenges in photography to me is to define a personal point
of view. During my work in Botswana's Okavango Delta, I looked for ways
to capture the essence of this great wetland and my own response to the
wonder of it. The Okavango covers thousands of square miles, but it is
really just a thin sheet of water stretched across the sands of the
Kalahari. The delta's water lilies drew me in because they symbolize
life made possible by water in this dry land. I photographed lilies
covering lakes and giving shelter to an array of animal life, but I was
searching for something more lyrical. One day I looked down in a clear
lagoon and noticed how a patch of lilies was anchored in desert sand.
An idea took hold. I plunged into the swamp. Actually, I slipped in.
Quietly. Crocodiles abound here. While an assistant stood guard in a
small boat, I sank to the bottom with a camera encased in a
bubble-shaped underwater housing. I held my breath on each dive, which
allowed for less than a minute at the bottom. It took many attempts and
the better part of a day for the image to become refined. I was
intrigued by the sinuous curves of the lily stems. In an interesting
reversal of the maxim about magic light peaking around sunrise and
sunset, underwater photography conditions get better towards high noon,
when light penetrates farther into the depths. By the time I had
figured out solutions to the technical problems of this shot, the midday
sun backlit the lily pads suspended at the water's surface. From the
bottom of the swamp I saw that the lilies told a larger story, about the
anomaly of water in the desert. In one sense the margin for life was
exactly the distance from the lilies above my head to my toes buried in
the sand. But my perspective was of the exuberance, not the limits, of
life. The water was only a few feet deep, but the lilies reached for
the sky."- Frans Lanting
of the Giants, Botswana 1989
African elephants at twilight, Loxodonta
africana, Chobe National Park, Botswana
"During the year I spent living
in the Okavango Delta of Botswana, I worked at night for periods of
time, waking up at sunset to follow animals through the hours of
darkness. I often started the evening at a favorite water hole where I
hunkered down by the edge and made myself a fixture in the landscape.
Elephants moved around me in the waning light like shadowy forms. One
evening a herd of bulls gathered across the water from me, rising above
their reflections under an October moon, in a primeval scene of ancient
Africa. Elephants move seasonally in and out of the Okavango and
across northern Botswana, ranging over huge territories to find what
they need to survive. In an earlier era, elephant trails crisscrossed
the entire African continent. If you fly over the land, you see
elephant trails, some abandoned, others still followed. Older elephants
pass on their knowledge to younger generations, and the matriarchs and
old bulls know of places that are used as refuges in times of drought or
stress–places that may be visited only once in a lifetime. What maps
are carried in the minds of elephants? Their epic wanderings over
northern Botswana may be part of larger ecological patterns that go
beyond rainy and dry seasons, years of drought and decades of plenty.
What elephants know lies on the fringes of our understanding, like the
indistinct forms of animals in the night, moving just beyond the edge of
human vision. The existence of huge free-roaming herds of elephants in
Botswana is a symbol for both the nature of this landscape and for the
human decisions that must be made about the fate of wild places and
wildlife both here and elsewhere on earth. How we balance those
interests will be the legacy of our time, the path we leave on the land." – Frans Lanting
Photography
The auction will take place on April 22 to coincide with the 40th anniversary of Earth Day and will be held at
Christie’s, Rockefeller Center, New York and carried live globally via
Christie’s LIVE™ on www.christies.com. Members of the Green
Auction Host Committee in NY include Leonardo DiCaprio, Harrison Ford,
Tobey Maguire, François-Henri Pinault, Salma Hayek, Bob Fisher, Candice
Bergen, Ed Norton, Evelyn Lauder, Alec Baldwin, Zaha Hadid, Brooke
Shields, and Matt Lauer.
You can also bid on select items after the evening
event through Christie’s partner, Charitybuzz, the leading destination
for online charity benefit auctions. The companion silent auction
will be hosted at www.ABidtoSavetheEarth.org It'll run through May 6th.
Christie’s will waive all fees and commissions for the auction.
Visit www.abidtosavetheearth.org to bid on items in the
silent auction, including signed prints of some of the Top 40 images. You can also check out the complete gallery of 40 photographs at this Flickr page.
