Breaking Fast With The Wild In 2025
An annual rite that celebrates not only the art of seeing, but the ethics of attention itself. Beneath the vaulted arches of Hintze Hall, where a blue whale skeleton floats like a celestial relic, tables were set among fossils and ammonites. Coffee steamed beside trays of fruit and pastries as curators spoke softly about timing, light, and narrative. There is something uncanny about breakfast beside deep time, a reminder that the humans in this hall (residents, volunteers, photographers, artists, archaeologists, etymologists) are merely another species passing through.
Now in its 61st year, the Wildlife Photographer of the Year drew over 60,000 entries from across the globe. The selected images are not simply beautiful; they are witnesses. Each frame is a record of encounter and impermanence, a tension between wonder and warning. Curators explained that the competition has evolved beyond aesthetics toward what they call “story within the frame.”
The museum has begun referencing ecological metrics like the Biodiversity Intactness Index, making explicit that what we’re admiring is not eternal but endangered. It’s a subtle, necessary reframing: these photographs are not trophies of nature, but pleas for its continued existence. Viewed in the hush of early morning, the images took on a devotional quality.
The sunrise filtering through the museum’s stained glass walls echoed the dawns and dusks captured in the photographs themselves. Much of the best wildlife photography depends on waiting, on being still enough to see what the world is doing when we’re not watching. In bringing the distant close, the exhibition makes the familiar strange again. The urban viewer, fresh from the Underground, suddenly finds themselves face to face with a tiger’s tooth or a solitary spider. These images remind us that the world is still animate, still self-organising, and so much more than a backdrop.
As one curator remarked, “Every year visitors return to experience an emotional journey anew.” This year, that journey feels less like exploration and more like a call to realignment. The breakfast served as both beginning and benediction, a small communion before re-entering the larger conversation between humans and the rest of life. To linger among these images is to sense what Ilya Prigogine might have called “order through fluctuation”: the wild as a living system, forever sustaining itself at the edge of collapse. The photographers, in their own way, are custodians of that edge: translating the flux of the living world into flashes of intelligible grace.
The 2025 grand title winner, Ghost Town Visitor by Wim van den Heever, captures a brown hyena standing ghost-like amid the abandoned diamond-mining ruins of Namibia’s Kolmanskop; A deserted town swallowed by desert sands. The image is part elegy, part prophecy: what was once a monument to human ambition has become a shrine to nature’s quiet reclamation. The animal looks neither frightened nor triumphant, simply present, but the territory has been returned.
The Young Photographer of the Year, Andrea Dominizi, brings this meditation closer to home with After the Destruction. A longhorn beetle clings to a rusted piece of machinery in the forests of Italy’s Lepini Mountains, a fragile survivor in the ruins of human industry. Once thriving in dense beech forests, the beetle’s habitat has been increasingly fragmented by logging and development, leaving it to inhabit the edges of what remains. With this knowledge, the contrast between the insect’s intricate body and the hulking mechanical carcass behind it makes for an unusually moving sight.
Together, these images reveal that wildlife photography today is less about capturing beauty than bearing witness. Each photograph is an act of attention: a negotiation between truth and framing, between the fleeting and the eternal. The camera becomes both instrument and conscience, translating biodiversity into the language of empathy. In an era where extinction outpaces evolution, these images do more than touch us; they implicate us. Photography, activism, and ecology converge here as a single practice of seeing – a reminder that truth is not just what exists, but what we choose to preserve in focus.
