Steve Bloom

Sunday 25 September 11.00 am – Travelling Wild - ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY

Sunday 16 October 1130 am – A Cultural Journey through Africa – ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY

Wednesday 5 October – Shooting the World – KENT CREATIVE ARTS

Wednesday 9 November - A Cultural Journey through Africa – WATERSTONES ST MARG. CANTERURY

Saturday 19 November – Capturing the World - BJP VISION - OLYMPIA, LONDON

Wednesday 30 November 6.30 pm – Living Africa – IPC PHOTO MAGAZINES LONDON

MORE ABOUT STEVE’S TALKS.

Waterstones temporary bookshop selling Steve Bloom's Books

I am back from Chichester Festivities and am happy to say there was a good crowd and the event sold out. Waterstones set up a great temporary shop in the Cathedral grounds. Future talks include Edinburgh Book Festival, Kent Creative Arts, Royal Geographic Society and Waterstones Canterbury. Details on our talks page here, but I will update again closer to each event.

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Here is an example of a more unusual usage of my images. A client of the great tattoo artist Anil Gupta bought the right to have one of  my swimming elephant pictures tattooed. Here’s the original, and the back!

Steve Bloom's swimming elephant as a tattoo

Wodaabe man, Gerewol Festival, Niger

Steve Bloom will be presenting vibrant lectures at the Royal Geographic Society in Kensington, London. The events, held in conjunction with the Travel Photographer of the Year, form part of a series of photography and travel workshops. Steve will be signing books after both events at Stanfords bookshop at the venue.

Travelling Wild - 25 September 11-12
Steve Bloom recounts his ten year journey photographing the world’s endangered wildlife. How do you get close to a grizzly bear? How should you behave in the presence of a gorilla? What do you do when being charged by a rhinoceros? He tells the stories behind the creation of his books In Praise of Primates, Untamed, Spirit of the Wild and Elephant! His giant outdoor exhibitions, seen by an estimated ten million people, play an important role in raising awareness of environmental issues.

A Cultural journey through Africa – 16 October 1130-1230

 Steve Bloom discusses the challenges he faced during fourteen years documenting this diverse continent for his books Living Africa and Trading Places: The Merchants of Nairobi. He takes the audience on an extensive tour, which includes encounters with the women of the Surma and Mursi tribes who wear giant lip plates, the fascinating male beauty contest of the Wodaabe in the Sahara Desert, the gold miners toiling 3km underground near Johannesburg and the shopkeepers in the poorer areas of Nairobi.

Other speakers at this exciting series of events include:

•Julian Paren – photographer & former member of Britsh Antarctic Survey
•Hugh Thomson – explorer & writer
•Chris Coe – photographer & founder of Travel Photographer of the Year
•Amanda Marks – founder of Tribes Travel, award winning Fair Trade travel company
•Jason Hawkes – aerial photographer, with books including ‘Britain From The Air’
•Nick Meers – panoramic photographer & author
•Nick Livesey – photographer & film maker
•Craig Churchill – nature photographer
•Martin Hartley – adventure & expedition photographer
•Sue Flood – photographer & producer, BBC Blue Planet

Contact the RGS

Forthcoming talks by Steve in 2011 include Chichester Festivities, the Edinburgh Book Festival, Kent Creative Arts and Waterstones Canterbury.

Discover more about Steve Bloom’s speaking events and read testimonials.

Elephants as they should be. Don't let the sun set on Anne.

Abuse chould NEVER be tolerated. I have written books about elephants and spent a lot of time with them, so I was deeply upset to see the video of arthritic circus elephant Anne being abused at the Bobby Roberts circus. I commend Animal Defenders for the way they have exposed the appalling treatment, and consequently Anne is being moved to Longleat.

Elephants are sentient, and suffer physical and emotional pain as we do. I may be stating the obvious, but it is easy to lose sight of the common threads that link us all, and denigrate our own humanity and dignity by violating the basic rights of others.

I wish Anne a peaceful retirement, but it’s a sad fact that the psychological wounds of abuse linger long after the physical beating stops.

Animal Defenders report and video.

Daily Mail Article.

Elephant Books.

Steve will be presenting the 2011 Wratten lecture in Croydon. The lecture, titled Living Africa, will cover his work photographing and writing about Africa. He will discuss the photographic challenges faced across the diverse continent, and will take the audience on a visual tour, covering everything from stunning wildlife photographed from a helicopter, to workers in  gold mines 3km underground, to the fascinating male beauty contest of the Wodaabe in the Sahara Desert. Steve will also cover his work on the book Trading Places – The Merchants of Nairobi, featuring the street art in kenya’s bustling capital.

See Video of Steve at work on Living Africa, and talking about Trading Places.

Wednesday 30th March 2011 at 8pm
Shirley Methodist Church
Eldon Avenue, Shirley, Croydon

Admission by ticket, price £6

WRATTEN, 12 Wickham Road, Croydon CR0 BA, with SAE.
Please make cheques payable to ‘Croydon Camera Club.’
(Telephone enquiries: 0208-654-3041)

Downolad flyer.

The Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize exhibition is  at London’s National Portrait Gallery.

 My photogaph of Tim Andrews is in the exhibition. When Tim was fifty-four, he  was diagnosed with Parkinsons, and two years later he embarked on a personal project to be photographed by numerous different photographers. The picture was made with a long exposure of almost a minute in his darkened bedroom. The bedroom is both the most private sanctuary and the place in which we sometimes have nightmares. Though Tim was naked in front of his bedroom wall, all props and clues to his whereabouts have been removed, so that layers of his character could be revealed without distractions. 

Tim’s body was illuminated with an undulating light during the long exposure, so he was effectively painted with light. The picture has a painterly quality, capturing facets of his persona as his expression changed during the exposure. The word ‘photograph’ literally means to draw with light.

The picture challenges the ‘decisive moment’ school of photographic thinking. One of the reasons why paintings often have a greater resonance than photographs, is because they are made over a period of time and built up in layers. We don’t see or experience life in flashes of a 250th of a second. Instead, our eyes dart around and there is an unfolding synthesis of images which our brains interpret as experience.

Tim is a remarkable man who has allowed 130 photographers to portray him, and his project will be featured in The Guardian Weekend on 12th February. BBC2’s Culture Show is running a feature on Tim on February 10th.

Read critic Francis Hodgson’s review for the FT in which he discusses the picture. There’s also a link at the end of his article to a video which is worth watching.

After I gave a talk in Oxford’s Natural History Museum, Dave Dellatore introduced himself to me and showed me a tattoo of one of my photographs on his back. Dave was studying primate conservation at Oxford Brookes University and he is a committed conservationist.  I was amazed and flattered. I always ‘back up’ my digital images, but this gave a new meaning to the expression. My pictures have been printed on fine art paper, canvas, roller blinds, jigsaw puzzles, but human skin was a first. Compare the images. Photo of Dave by Felicia Ruperti.

There is currently a group Exhibition, African Odyssey, in Cape Town which will run during during the World Cup. It is being held at Raw Vision Gallery, 89 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock. See http://tinyurl.com/34f4k37 for the range of Steve Bloom’s pictures and http://www.africanodyssey.org/african_odyssey/Home.html for exhibition details.