Animal Instinct

When Steve Gosling booked a safari, he didn’t have the usual in mind. He tells Ailsa McWhinnie why colour was never going to work for him

- Ailsa McWhinnie

When is a landscape photographer not a landscape photographer? When they agree to go on a safari to Botswana, in the hope of witnessing some of the planet’s finest creatures, that’s when. However, for Steve Gosling, while the environment may have been entirely new to him, his approach to making images ended up changing very little from his usual approach. ‘I’m a great believer in working outside of your comfort zone,’ he asserts. ‘And I was determined to see the wildlife from my perspective.’

Spending three nights in three locations, he stuck to his tried-and-tested approach of taking only two or three images at a time. ‘I tried to pre-visualise as I would with a landscape,’ he explains. ‘I always ask myself what it is I’m after, what I’m trying to say and what I need to happen in order to communicate that.’

He knew he wanted the images he took to end up either as framed prints or in a book, so he shot with that in mind. Hence when they encountered a cheetah that had killed an impala, he took a few images for himself, but knew they would never end up on somebody’s wall. ‘The vision I had in mind affected what, when and how I photographed,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t sitting in the truck ticking off species. Sometimes I saw things and was amazed, but I didn’t always photograph them.’