Between Patience, Instinct and the Wild

Over time, the landscape in Turgay Uzer’s photographs has come to carry as much weight as the animal that first drew him to the camera. Years in the field have opened up a complex web of relationships between species, habitats and the people who know them first-hand. In this conversation with AH Magazine, he reflects on how physics and photography have shaped different ways of seeing, what he has learned from the guides he works with and how experience in the wild influences what a photographer chooses to preserve in an image.

When you look back over the past decade, how have your long journeys and time in the wild changed the way you live and see the world beyond photography itself?

I started out as an average tourist with a camera and ended up as a conservationist. Not having studied zoology, biology or environmental science, I didn’t know anything about the connections between animals and their environment. To me, the environment was merely a backdrop to my true interest: the animals. Any time spent looking at the environment felt like time taken away from the animals!

The half-serious evolutionary chain reaction (or biological jest) popularised by Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species, namely that the global power of the Royal Navy rested entirely on the affectionate care that spinsters provided to their pet cats, would have been completely lost on me!

In the intervening years, I have evolved to see how interconnected everything in nature truly is. Now I appreciate that elephants are the gardeners of the savanna, keeping it from reverting to dense woodland and preserving the East African grasslands for the famous megaherds of grazers. I also see how predators play a vital role by removing weak members from the gene pool, while apex predators keep smaller carnivores in check so they don’t wreak havoc on bird populations. Once you see these connections, you can imagine the damage humans inflict by wiping out keystone species such as elephants or apex predators.

It has taken eons to establish these delicate balances, yet humans have by and large disrupted them in a mere century.

What habit from your decades in physics did you have to unlearn to become a better photographer, and what has photography taught you that you wish you had known when you were a professor?

My background in physics was initially a tremendous asset because I already understood the principles of light and optics. Classical optics was largely perfected in the 19th century and isn’t emphasised much in physics education today, but those foundations proved invaluable. If anything, I simply wish I had paid more attention to photographic lenses and sensor technology earlier on!

The real challenge was a mindset shift. Physics research demands absolute precision, leaving zero room for ambiguity. In photography, that instinct drives you towards flawless technical execution. Yet the most memorable images rarely stay with us because of their technical perfection; instead, they capture us through subtle vagueness, mood or suggestion. While ambiguity is foreign to physics, it is the very heart of art; photography, in the end, is an art rather than a science.

Which photograph in your archive, aside from the images you have spoken about most often, has a story behind it that you would particularly like to tell? Where were you, how long did the encounter last and how did the photograph come about?

My list of images tied to stories is long, but I feel photographs alone can’t tell the whole tale. Can you reconstruct an entire movie plot from a single still? Nevertheless, I will include some of these images and share the context behind them.

The disembodied leopard eye: You can tell the cat is looking up, but what you don’t see, and what I missed initially, is that it had hoisted its kill into the tree before heading down to drink. I owe that sighting entirely to my guide, Jacob Shawa, who picked out that single eye amid the thick brush.

The three-legged wild dog: African wild dogs embody ‘all for one and one for all’. Despite having lost a leg, most likely to a snare, this dog was still participating in hunts and acting as pack leader. Had it been unable to hunt, the pack would have fed it or assigned it babysitting duties. Their level of social cohesion is rare in nature.

The elephant mother and calf: Watching from the bridge over the dry Katete riverbed, I saw a mother desperately trying to keep her tiny calf away from a well she had dug in the sand. She knew the youngster would likely cause the hole to collapse or, worse, fall in, and that it was too young to drink with its trunk anyway. After firmly pushing it aside, they moved on, and the calf nursed safely elsewhere.

The baboon and the antelope: While baboons and antelopes often graze together, baboons also hunt hidden newborn fawns. A massive alpha male grabbed a hidden baby, climbed a tree and devoured it while his subordinates watched in absolute submission, occasionally catching a tossed scrap. The parallels to human society were chillingly familiar.

I have many more stories, but I will stop there for the sake of brevity.

Who has shown you something in the field that no book ever could, and how did it change the way you see animals?

My travels are entirely photography-driven, and in the field I always work with two guides: a seasoned local guide who knows the land and animals, and a photography guide who coordinates with the local guide from a visual standpoint. Without them, I would have missed all those incredible moments I mentioned in my previous answer.

Witnessing an African wild dog hunt is a prime example. Their hunts are among the most challenging and sought-after safari spectacles because the dogs are hyperactive, blindingly fast and capable of slipping into terrain that vehicles cannot cross. Their chases cover vast distances at breakneck speeds, and because the kill and feeding happen in a matter of minutes, it truly is a ‘you snooze, you lose’ scenario. I was able to experience those intense hunts from start to finish in South Luangwa National Park entirely thanks to my guides, Jacob Shawa and Steve Chulu, who share my deep passion for the wild.

Which experiences in the wild have stayed with you more vividly than many of your successful images, and why?

There are so many! In the interest of brevity, I will restrict myself to a few. My first safari was also the first time I used a DSLR. I was already overjoyed to have moved beyond the 36-frame limit of film to what seemed like an infinity of images. But the real eye-opener came when I took an elephant photo that was far too dark. Back in camp, when I fired up my editing software and began to lift the shadows, I watched with amazement as that rubbish image gradually brightened, revealing every fold and crease of the elephant’s skin. It was like wiping a dirty window to reveal a landscape behind it. ‘It’s a brave new world,’ I remember thinking!

Quite a few years later, by then much more experienced, I found myself in the rainforest of Gabon’s Loango National Park, following a gorilla family. The family was habituated, meaning accustomed to human presence, and didn’t mind us following them closely on their foraging trips. They would occasionally stop to eat, giving us an opportunity to snap even more photos. The group’s family dynamic was unusual: the silverback’s oldest son had been passed over as successor in favour of a younger brother, who was a very pleasant young prince. The frustrated older brother, however, was not so amiable, as I found out first-hand! I was snapping photos of him and must have strayed over some invisible boundary because he suddenly lunged at me. It wasn’t a full charge, as he came at me for less than a metre, but his body language and vocalisations left no doubt how angry he was. He left me shaking. It was an important lesson: there is no room for complacency when dealing with wild animals, no matter how habituated they are.

My last encounter shows that you can never truly know what is going on in an animal’s mind. My guide and I were driving peacefully through South Luangwa National Park, where elephants are accustomed to the sight of cars and people. We had passed many elephants earlier, and there was no reason why a huge bull in the distance should have been upset with us. Yet he was, and he started a terrifying charge towards us, trumpeting all the way. We got out of the area as fast as possible.

A few days later, we were passing through the same area in a convoy of cars when we spotted the same bull in the distance. Would you believe it? He started running again, but the surprise was that he charged not at any of the other cars but specifically at us! Why? It remains a mystery.

Naturally, I don’t have any photos of either of those moments!

Your work moves between animals in vast landscapes and intimate close-up portraits. How do you decide when the animal should fill the frame and when its surroundings need to become part of the story?

Most photographers start out trigger-happy, shooting everything in sight. As their technical skills improve, they chase textbook perfection: tight framing with a long lens, shallow depth of field, pinpoint sharpness and, of course, eye contact. Eventually, though, we all realise we could have made that exact same portrait in a zoo; such an image belongs in a field guide rather than in a gallery where it is expected to tell a story.

The real shift happens when you begin showing the animal within its home, capturing how it truly fits into its environment. Today, I balance both approaches, but I take special care to ensure that my ‘animalscapes’, as I like to call them, feel authentic and grounded rather than look as though the animal had been photoshopped into a background!

Over the decades, you have watched wild places change. What can photography genuinely change, and where, in your experience, does its power end?

In mid-August 2026, a remarkable photo showing two giant sable antelopes began circulating on social media. The giant sable is one of Africa’s most magnificent animals. Around the same time, Angola Tourism reported:

“On 9 August 2026, Cangandala National Park in Malanje Province witnessed an extraordinary sight: more than 200 giant sable antelopes gathered in a single location! The giant sable antelope is endemic to Angola and, for decades, faced an uncertain future with the species reaching critically low numbers. So, seeing more than 200 giant sable antelopes roaming freely in their natural sanctuary is far more than a remarkable wildlife encounter; it represents a remarkable conservation success story.”

And this after the number of pure-blooded giant sables had dropped to fewer than twenty at the beginning of this century! In the early 1970s, just before the outbreak of Angola’s 27-year civil war, which went on to severely affect the giant sable’s habitat and Angola’s wildlife more broadly, the population was estimated at around 2,000 individuals in the Luando Strict Nature Reserve and Cangandala National Park. Similar comeback stories have been reported for tigers, both Bengal and Siberian, mountain gorillas and the Amur leopard, to name a few.

Nature is resilient. Given a chance, it will come back, and come back spectacularly. This has been the case with Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park, which rivalled South Africa’s Kruger before the country’s civil war, and it is the same story with Chad’s Zakouma National Park. I have not been to any of these places, so how am I finding out about these success stories? Through photographs, of course. I would encourage everyone with a serious interest in wildlife to photograph and share such success stories, showing that the battle for wildlife is not lost as long as we give nature a chance!

Over the last two decades, environmentally conscious photographers have documented the horrors that humans have inflicted on nature: destruction, pollution and the outright slaughter of animals. Who can forget the image of an orangutan trying to stop a bulldozer from levelling the remnants of its forest home? Or bears foraging in city garbage dumps? Or mountains of ivory being burned by wildlife officials?

I feel that the awareness raised by these images contributed to the successes I mentioned at the beginning of my answer. But we all appreciate that images alone will not do the job.

Making people aware of the slaughter involved in obtaining rhino horn is one thing; changing demand for rhino horn in traditional medicine is another. Action is what counts in the end.

Today, Turgay Uzer sees each animal in the context of its habitat, behaviour and the wider network of relationships to which it belongs. Photography allows him to carry those experiences forward, from encounters that last only seconds to changes that reveal themselves over years. For him, an image reaches its fullest meaning when the attention it sparks grows into interest, understanding and action to protect the world it depicts.

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