ENCOUNTERS: A Photographic Journey

This book's stunning photos are presented in four sections, each of which challenges the viewer to a greater awareness of human diversity and resilience. "Frontiers" represents the isolated, remote and wild places "where people and nature co-exist and collide"; "Conflict" explores areas scarred by war; "Heritage" discovers how different cultures and ancient ways of life continue in spite of modernity; and "Community" seeks to understand how society is bonded together and humanity thrives. The author sees his photography, collected round the world over a period of ten years, as part of a wider method of storytelling, unfiltered and sometimes deliberately chaotic. Many of the images were captured at high altitudes, in inaccessible valleys, in jungles, deserts and war zones. Fisherwomen with baskets in Botswana seek to feed their families in precarious conditions, sharing the landscape with herds of elephants, while a beautiful sunset in Sudan captures a moment of serenity for the Mundari people who escaped with their cattle to the Sudd swamps on the Nile to get away from the war. High in the Pamir mountains of Afghanistan, a group of women and girls, frontier nomads in the Wakhan Corridor, are pictured milking their yaks. "Conflict" includes the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, Palestinian Protesters burning tyres on the West Bank, and on a different continent a patrol of heavily armed rangers in the Congo, with the task of protecting some of the world's last mountain gorillas and forest elephants against the poachers who do not hesitate to kill humans as well as wildlife. "Heritage" features the Golden Temple of Amritsar by night and an atmospheric night-time street scene in Durbar Square, Kathmandu, home to ancient temples and ornate doorways. Illustrating "Community", a group of San children in Botswana are pictured with a large egg they have foraged, representing an almost extinguished hunter-gatherer way of life on the edge of the Kalahari desert. Walking the length of the Nile, the author finds the Nubians among the most hospitable people in the world. 224pp, colour photos on every double spread.