From a young age, Chris Packham was torn between art and science. His mother brought him to galleries; his analytically-minded father took him to museums to view the natural history. They were the only two subjects at school that interested the young Packham, and the only two at which he excelled. 

In his twenties – after instructive detours through punk music, academia and oil painting – Packham discovered he could resolve this disciplinary tension through the practice of photography.  

‘When I graduated from university, I had no photographic training,’ Packham recalls. ‘I bought all the photography books I could, and I read them all. I went to evening classes to do black and white development and printing. I did some work for my sister, who’s a fashion designer, and ended up having a couple of pictures published in Vogue. But eventually I realised that, if I was going to communicate more effectively, I needed to photograph something that I had a connection with. That was always going to be nature.’

As Packham describes it, the idea for a photograph arrives in his mind much like a well-formed theory, and, like a scientist designing an experiment, he contrives to engineer the conditions necessary for such a photograph to come into being, imposing rigorous constraints on time, attention and the scope of his focus. Reducing uncertainty, increasing control. 

‘Science is the art of understanding truth and beauty,’ the photographer maintains. ‘The more I understand why I’m perceiving something as beautiful, the better I can maximise and communicate that beauty to the viewer.’

Packham’s photographic practice is as singular and unapologetically eccentric as his character; his neurodivergent traits amplify an obsessive, uncompromising temperament common among highly productive and creative people. ‘Control is a crucial aspect for me,’ he insists, ‘The more control you have, the better.’

Achieving this control can take many forms: planting stakes in the ground to demarcate the area of focus, squeaking to attract the attention of foxes, shining a laser pen on the ground to redirect the gaze of a leopard. In this sense, Packham’s photography resists the conventions that dominate much of wildlife photography. He is not interested in chance sightings, or the quiet triumph of simply witnessing nature. Nor is he drawn to the documentary imperative that shapes much conservation photography, where the urgency of the message subordinates the integrity of the image. For Packham, the photograph itself remains paramount. If it fails compositionally, it fails entirely.

But if his practice is unhindered by the need to be didactic, it’s because morality informs Packham’s art at a deeper level. Unconditional love for non-human animals and radical ecocentrism are the fundamental motivations for his work.