Robert Kirby
THE MIRACLE RIVERS by Peter and Beverly Pickford (Southern)
Any new book by Peter and Beverly Pickford raises expectations. The work of these two gifted wildlife photographers has always been of almost solitary excellence. In a market these days far more than adequately served, the Pickfords’ work remains individual and always surprising. Their photography rises to the level of art. This new book will not disappoint.
The rivers of the title are the Okavango and the Chobe, in Botswana. A sojourn by the Pickfords of some two years in and around these two waterways has been recorded in this new book, not only by means of an assemblage of quite astonishing photography, but one which also delivers the coffee-table format into new dimensions. A good third of the book is given to text, in which Peter Pickford exhibits a substantial literary profit. His writing is polished and, above all, unsentimental.
Most effective in the book is the frequent use of sepia-toned photographs which serve narrative but which also prove something of a relief from what so many wildlife books offer: page after page of beautifully rendered colour photography and which eventually dulls the senses.
The text tells stories, describes journeys and encounters and, best of all, is always reflective of the wildness and never so arrogant as to attempt to describe what is indescribable. What comes through most of all, and which makes this book so distinctive, is its human element. From glimpses of the life of the hermetic River Bushmen to the tales of the fireside.
Pickford writes compellingly on the role of wilderness, mourning the fact that its essential values are being turned into a commodity by a selfish world. In this way man denies both spirit and soul of wild places, making of them gigantic zoos. Man has become spectator.
“In placing only a material worth on wilderness, we have severed man’s final alliance with the earth. We have denied ourselves as part of all creatures and all things, and have committed ourselves to a path of great loneliness. In holding ourselves separate and aloof, we have subjected all that of which we are not a part to condescension, and have made ourselves masters.”
What rises from this remarkable book is the vital acknowledgement that the planet cannot afford the thoughtless and savage ravishment of another 20th century. In this way the book is both an evocation of wildness and a strident alarm call.