Documentary

Under the Skin

African safari is altogether otherworldly, inspirational, gut-wrenching, vivid, soothing and challenging. Bumping about the bush with a bunch of strangers, the camaraderie climbs fast and branches out in unexpected directions.

The landscapes are familiar and strange all at once. The wildlife emerge and fade away quickly, slowly and suddenly. You observe, uncover and appreciate more about them with every moment together.  You watch them hunt and dance and feed and flirt and love and grieve, and think about those such moments from your own life. Sometimes it aches, and sometimes it reveals a new, broader space to you.

Traversing those wide plains, it feels like your life is both rewinding and surging forward in a wonderfully wild way. Suddenly sometimes you find yourself floating lightly in one spot; dirty and sleepy and perfectly happy.  Watching a long, long trail of elephants saunter by casually and magnificently. Completely surrounded by a circular sunset, laughing as fat drops of rain break the sky and bounce off your group as you grip each other with glee. That place pulls all the threads of life together in the most spectacular way.

Behind The Scenes with nicole marie

Hi, Nicole here. This is a little behind the scenes info on this project, to provide some context for you to enjoy the imagery more closely.

Under the Skin is a project that grew out of a trip to South Africa and Botswana for a photo safari with Canon Australia and C4 Photo Safaris. I was quite clouded in grief at that time. I was getting through, but struggling to find the space or the time or the place for my loss.

So we packed our bags and we literally flew across the world. We flew across Antarctica. It was perfectly mesmerizing, the tone and the light and the feel of it. I spent a lot of time at this tiny little window near the bathroom just watching, watching it change and feeling that transition in me to something new and feeling that space grow. Wildlife photography was something completely new to me, a new genre. It turns out, actually, that it’s quite similar to portraiture, which is something I love.

It’s really all about observation and empathy. The more you observe and respond and know about your subject, the closer you feel to the country and the people and the wildlife. And the more you can connect that knowledge in an image. You start to see how much it mirrors the peaks and troughs of human life. The beauty and the brutalities of it. It was like a visual therapy.

Thanks for taking the time to listen in today, if you’d like to chat about your upcoming projects with me, please call me or e-mail me through my contact page. Love to hear from you.

Under the Skin

Nicole Marie Photography

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