What if you just leave it? Rewilding reconsidered...

“What if you just leave it?” is all about rewilding in the UK, and is both a personal labour of love and an important piece of digital storytelling. The idea arose from my love of nature combined with an MA Photography project. My work involved field work in the UK in which I photographed the people doing rewilding, their land and the animals that are used to undertake it. These animals, the ‘ecosystem engineers’, are instead of the large herbivores that would have roamed free and naturally ‘managed’ the land long ago. They include hardy old breed cows, old variety pigs, wilder ponies, deer and beavers. The intention of this project was to raise awareness of, and dispel myths about rewilding, of which there are many. It is also pitched at various levels to help people understand why rewilding is so important if we are to stop the extinction of biodiversity and help reduce the impacts of climate change. This subset of images from the wider body of work is about getting up close and personal to a rewilding area, and is called Rewilding reconsidered. It is a mixture of the 'engineers', the landscape, and close-up work. The black and white aesthetic is to remove any feeling of traditional glamour through colour, and so highlight the messy, abstract and sometimes uncanny nature of rewilding, and look to provoke an emotional response. This aesthetic also allows the textures and behaviour of nature to come to the fore, things we rarely see now in our sanitised world.