Wildlife Photographer of the Year and the Temporalities of Wildlife Photography

This chapter examines the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition and exhibition through the lens of temporality. It explores the effects of changing conceptions of nature brought about by the climate emergency on the genre of wildlife photography. In its classical formulation, wildlife photography has been taken to provide access to a natural world in which humans are not present. In contrast, the climate emergency denies the possibility of nature unaffected by human activity. This chapter examines the competition as a proxy for examining the effects of changes in concepts of nature on wildlife photography as a practice. Examining the genre through four temporal lenses, historical, productive, diegetic, and lexical, I argue the emergence of new journalistic competition categories indicate that the genre is changing in response to changed understandings of the category of nature.