Tom Mustill
Big Game Photographer
The Shark and the Albatross: Travels with a Camera to the Ends of the Earth
By John Aitchison
Profile 240pp £17.99 order from our bookshop
Instead of observing wild animals for themselves, many humans today see them via the recordings of a small group of professionals whose job it is to capture them on film. Over the last fifty years, the equipment has become quieter and more mobile and the techniques have been honed to the point where we can watch, for example, orcas catch and devour a humpback whale calf in a remote sea through rock-steady, ultra-high-definition recordings captured from above, on and below the water’s surface.
No films of this sort are more celebrated than those produced by the Bristol-based BBC Natural History Unit. John Aitchison is one of this band. The images he’s recorded have helped shape how we imagine the wild. His magical book chronicles some of the missions he’s been on and documents some of the moral and personal conflicts involved.
Each chapter charts a different filming trip, many to the freezing poles. Aitchison concentrates in particular on his repeated attempts to film polar bears in the Arctic. But the book adds up to more than the sum of a few adventurous tales. The work involved in finding the animals is
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'There is a difference between a doctor who writes medical treatises and a doctor who writes absurdist fiction. Do we want our heart surgeon to be an anti-realist?'
Joanna Kavenna peruses Iain Bamforth's 'Scattered Limbs: A Medical Dreambook'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/trust-me-philosopher
How did Uwe Johnson, the German writer who was friends with Hannah Arendt and Max Frisch, end up living out his days in the town of Sheerness, Kent?
https://literaryreview.co.uk/estuary-german
You only have a week left to take advantage of our February offer: a six-month subscription for only £19.99.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/literaryfebruary/