My work is based on the emerging concept of rewilding as a way of enabling fast and effective nature restoration to aid the biodiversity and climate crises; hence the title, a question that I put to farmers and landowners “What if you just leave it?” referring to their marginal and less-productive land.
I have interviewed and photographed more than 30 experts, volunteers, farmers, landowners and so on from around the country, and made documentary photographic work about their projects. As such, and as you can see on this website - whatifyoujustleaveit.info The podcasts are embedded into the content of the case studies, or accessibly via all major platforms.
Rewilding is an important and growing part of ‘managing’ our natural landscape, but it is not well understood and often misconstrued in the press and on social media. Sir David Attenborough said in 2020 “We must rewild the world” but many people are unsure what that means. My work is all about ‘unwrapping’ the concept so that people can better understand it and get behind it.
Case studies
The stills photography I will be showing are around the three key elements of rewilding:
The People - location portraits of those people involved
The Engineers - the large animals that ‘create’ diversity, such as hardy cattle, deer, beavers or rare breed pigs
The Landscapes - the places that are created by rewilding, or in the process of being rewilded.
I will also show some drone stills that add to our understanding of rewilding, and on the screen I will have a looped video of drone footage from key rewilding sites. I will also try to have some audio shorts available - probably to listen to via QR codes.
I will dedicate one of the alcoves to my national award finalist series called OverExposed in which certain common but overlooked hedgerow species are photographed in a high key manner to ‘over’ expose them.
I have given some examples of this work below, and in the exhibition I will also make good use of text and captions. I am also continuing the project until December at least and will have some new work to integrate amongst the type of imagery I have put here.
People
Engineers
Landscapes
Looking down - drone work
OverExposed
My best contact details are: sam@samrose.uk and 07713 250273
This is from a visit to Chile in Jan 2024. to see Rewilding Chile projects and staff in Patagonia.