Steve Bloom: Photography is a Reflex
The world of photography has changed to almost unrecognisable proportions thanks to phones and digital cameras. It is estimated that more photographs will be taken in the next six months than in the whole history of photography up until now.
But with selfies and Instagram allowing almost anyone to become a photographer there is still an art and precision to the craft that few people are able to capture. Steve Bloom is a world renowned photographer who has travelled to every continent on the planet and seen his numerous books published in 21 different languages despite the fact Steve got into wildlife photography fairly late in life.
“I told my wife I’m having a bit of a midlife crisis. Should I get a red sports car or go as far away from you as possible and encounter wild animals?’ She told me to go with the wild animals because she felt that the sports car was more dangerous.”
Photography wasn’t new to him. In the 1970s he was exiled from South Africa during apartheid for his street photography of townships. So powerful were his images that they were used by anti-apartheid movement International Defence And Aid Fund (IDAF) which led the South African government to exile Steve while he was living in the UK. In 1993, when apartheid effectively came to an end, Steve returned to South Africa for a safari holiday that re-awoke his interest in photography.
Prior to his midlife-crisis and his rediscovered appetite for photography, Steve had been working as a photo-retoucher in Bristol before setting up his own photo stills company, specialising in complex special effects long before computers made things readily available.
While Steve wasn’t satisfied with his work at the time he now recognises the role it played in helping him hone his photography skills.
“I began to understand how important it is to have everything visually balanced so people would respond with the right kind of emotions to photographs. It was about fine tuning them. Things like composition and timing and that old cliche, the decisive moment — those you can’t really teach. They’re instinctive.”
If you have ten photographers photographing the same thing, all of them will come up with different results.
But now that we live in an age where anybody can take great photos thanks to the advances in digital technology, to professionals feel vulnerable? Steve thinks not. He argues that you can learn to take a good photo but that is merely the beginning.
He says, “In the same way that if you want to be a pianist you have to learn the technique of the piano. Beyond that, it’s something that comes from deep within. It’s connected to the type of person you are. If you have ten photographers photographing the same thing all of them will come up with different results.”
When it feels right that’s when you press the shutter.
Steve’s biggest concern in the age of digital photography is that people don’t value the process. When he first started out, a photo expedition would cost Steve around £3,000 for a week to ten days just in processing costs.
He says, “This meant I was very selective with what I shot. Now film is effectively free, so people don’t think. There’s a complacency. When I walk along the street I see people taking photos all the time and they’re not looking at what they’re doing.”
Crucially for Steve, capturing that perfect moment is something he’s been doing long enough not to be aware of it. “It’s not something you think about in a controlled, intellectual way. It’s instinctive, it’s all about feeling. It’s like a reflex. When it feels right that’s when you press the shutter. You’re looking through the viewfinder and you think ‘this is the balance I want’ and you get a twinge of excitement and you press the shutter.”
Steve has had a number of close calls but still managed to capture that perfect moment. One such moment happened in India when he was charged by a wild rhino. “It was a split second from this rhino happily grazing away to suddenly going full charge and all I could do was take a couple of pictures. There was no time to get away and at the last second the rhino swerved, I was covered in dust and very lucky and shaken.”
For Steve, photographing animals is ‘an antidote to the ugliness in the world’.
He says, “It is about capturing the exquisite beauty in the world but without sentimentality — just to show there is a very magical side to the world that doesn’t involve humans.” By contrast, photographing people is a difference experience. He says, “as a human I’m searching for some kind of way of understanding what another person is and get under their skin, and their experience. It’s that voyeuristic curiosity about trying to get out of your own self and into the self of someone else.”
Perhaps more than anything though, Steve is eager to point out that a photo is not the same as being somewhere and experiencing it, “The process of photographing is a creative process and it’s a very exciting process but it’s not the same as being there and breathing in the air and feeling the wind and so on.”
What Steve manages to do with his photography is to capture a very specific moment in time. Steve sums it up best reflecting on his time in the 1970s: “There is something that takes you back to an event in time that would have been lost forever had the photograph not been taken.”
You can follow Steve on Twitter, Facebook as well as finding all his books online and Elephants from Thames & Hudson
