Beverly and Dereck Joubert on what makes a good image and how photography has changed
The legendary pair share their thoughts on the craft of photography, what goes into a great shot, and what they hope for the future of wildlife.
More than 40 years of photographs by renowned conservationist Beverly Joubert have somehow been winnowed down to a few hundred of her most powerful shots for a new book, Wild Eye: A Life in Photographs. An elephant wading through a pond that shimmers like hammered gold, a melee of wildebeests fording a river, and I-want-to-go-to-there natural landscapes—these are just some of the photos that grace its pages.
Joubert and her filmmaker husband, Dereck—both National Geographic Explorers at Large— worked together on the book and sat down with National Geographic to discuss their process, their hopes and fears for the natural world, and to give advice for would-be wildlife photographers.
The book is a retrospective of sorts with shots from decades of your work. What made you want to do this kind of work now?
Dereck Joubert: I can answer that. I think it's a midpoint in Beverly's career. [Laughter] It seems like an opportune moment to get it out the door and to start afresh. No, we’ve seen some significant changes in the environments in which we work, and we wanted to catalogue that now. And then probably revisit again in 20 years or something like that and see if it turns around, which would be the hopeful version, or if it stays the same. So, it's a sort of benchmark in some ways, for all of us.
Beverly Joubert: If we look back at our journey over the 40 years, and this is both in photography and in film, which we have been doing recently as well, we can see the immense change. In the policies towards the environment—not always for the better—and in the burgeoning population slowly surrounding these last remaining wilderness areas, which can be catastrophic in so many ways. So we tried to bring this to the forefront in helping us celebrate the last remaining pristine wilderness areas, and hopefully we'll get hearts and minds wanting to assist in protecting them.
I’d love for you to talk about the process. I can't imagine the total number of photos you've taken in your lives. How did you go about picking the photos that ended up in the book?
Beverly Joubert: Yeah, that was with a huge amount of difficulty, I have to say. But through 40 years, I would always be going through editing. Looking at the most iconic moments, or the most iconic image that actually has mystery, that tells the whole story. It's not just an image that has been captured, you know, the story is the mystery, and through that, over the years, I have always kept a selection. Funny enough, they weren't necessarily always the images that ended up in the book. The process was ongoing.
So Dereck and I got to an edit that we felt was important in what we wanted to tell, and that was closely connected to our films and then we got that to National Geographic. They got to their selection, and then there was a wonderful collaboration where our creative minds all joined together and the book unfolded. But I must say the book unfolded in a very different way to the normal photographic book. We always had our filmic brain of not just wanting an image and a contrast to the next one that it wasn't telling a story. We always wanted the color, the hue of one image to blend to the next. We wanted a story to blend. And I think that's really what happened in the book, very different to all other books we've done.
Dereck Joubert: Part of the process is we broke them down into chapters that reflected or was symbolic of our journey, starting with Awe and then going on to these other things. So the selection of photographs went into these various bundles and we sometimes made choices on whether of those were representative of what we were feeling at that time and space our careers.
Were there any images that were particularly special to you as you were putting the book together?
Dereck Joubert: All the ones that are in focus...
Beverly Joubert: Obviously, you see, even on the wall here [gestures to a poster of the leopard on the wall], we have the cover, and we've lived with this image right through COVID. We thought that she would be a great spirit, you know, to keep the energy of the African wilderness alive. This particular leopard, we called Legadema, meaning light from the sky—we named her after a lightning bolt that hit very close to her and us—the compassion in her eyes, because we had been with her for four years so she knew us, we were another animal in the forest that she had a bond with. In fact, we almost felt that we were surrogate parents, I suppose we saw her as a surrogate child, seeing that we never had kids ourselves. She was the inspiration that drove us to start the Big Cats Initiative at National Geographic. We realized that the numbers of all big cats were declining over our lifetime, and we wanted to do something. So the film we created was on her: Eye of the Leopard. She became an amazing ambassador around the world. Funny enough, going through the photographs of her 40 years, she definitely had to be the cover.
You don't want animals to scare people. We feel that the only way we're going to protect animals is by their eyes. If the soul of an animal connects with you, you're going to fall in love with them. And so that's why the cover became what we call eyes like honey.
Dereck Joubert: I think what you've seen in this book is the tip of the iceberg. Beverly’s out there shooting 10,000, 20,000 images a month, and picking one or two out of that each month. So there's not an image within this book that, as I look through it now, I go, “You know that's maybe not as good as the other.” This is really that selection of 40 years.
Are there particular shots, for lack of a better word, that you are still chasing?
Beverly Joubert: You know, as animal lovers and animal behaviorists we are always chasing the unknown. And it is remarkable that we can feel that we haven't captured everything, because then we might as well hang up our cameras and film cameras and just stop. But the unknown for me is being totally open to whatever it is. And nature surprises us and me all the time. We were recently in Alaska, and my eyes were opened wide, in the beauty and being with humpback whales so close up and seeing the grizzly bears. Discovering new animals, as well as new interactions, is always there.
For instance, when we started in the '80s and into the '90s, we started in a time where there was a huge change, a huge shift in our area, and the whole area dried up for 27 years. And so what we were witnessing, no scientists had ever seen before. And I suppose that has kept us always enthralled and looking for that unknown of what people haven't seen. And that's how we were the first to capture lions jumping on elephants and bringing four, five-year-old calves down all the way up to a 21-year-old cow. So, yes, open at all times, waiting for something new.
Dereck Joubert: From a parallel film point of view, it's a fool's errand to chase the photograph. The photograph will find you and the opportunity will find you. The more you chase it, the more distance distant it becomes.
Beverly Joubert: But saying that, you can't just expect it to happen without doing the time. We’re out there doing the time. We have the patience, 16 to 18 hours a day, you know, waiting and observing.
We live in this day and age with the ubiquity of photography. Everybody is a photographer with their social media, the safari industry is booming, so everybody's out there taking photos of lions and an elephants, etc. Has this sort of new digital age and that environment changed at all how you think about photography in your work?
Dereck Joubert: Completely changed it, actually. When she started, Beverly was loading a canister of 36 frames into a camera and shooting off the perfect frame every now and again and winding it on. So today being able to shoot a thousand frames in a few minutes is a very, very different canvas. The principles are the same within the frame, but the sheer excess of it can be overwhelming.
From a filmmaking point of view, again, there’s the sheer excess of what we can now capture because you can leave the camera on the whole day, and change the battery periodically. And in that, there's a bit of a handicap in that each image becomes less precious. It's much less of an artisan craft now. If you allow yourself to be beguiled by the excess of the fast food of the digital era in photography. But if you can resist that temptation, the rewards are incredible, because there’s access to the moment that we were losing before.
Beverly Joubert: Going back to that time when it was on film, I would have to wait three to six months to even see an image. We would have to ship it out to London, get it developed. But of course, we were still in the bush. It would take us a long time to be able to edit those images. You didn't necessarily grow in a way of understanding where you went wrong with the light or, did you need another moment trying to capture something? If a hyena and a lion are in battle, you've got that one moment. You better get it right. Otherwise, it's not going to happen.
Whereas today, I think a lot of people will put it on the highest frames per second, and they will just shoot off a thousand images of that same scene. But did you really masterfully capture the most creative moment? And I think coming from film, it gave me that sort pattern to just breathe, take a moment, and still treat it as an art form and to capture it the way it needed the respect to be able to capture it.
I think that what you were saying is everybody is shooting off for an iPhone. There are times that I'll go on Instagram, and I'll go, “How did they capture that moment?” And that truly, often, is somebody out there, they've got a three-day trip, and it was serendipitous. They were very fortunate, and yet we could have been waiting a year to capture something similar. Our art needed to have the time. But there are times that somebody might get lucky.
The photography and filmmaking are tied to your efforts around conservation, environmentalism. In the 40 years that you have been working what do you think are the most significant ways in which things have already changed? And what are the things you're keeping your eye on the most?
Dereck Joubert: So when we were born there was just shy of a billion people on the planet and today there are eight plus. So an eight-fold increase in the number of people and the parts of the planet that are being consumed by those people, and consumed in food products, in livestock, concrete stripmalls, whatever it is that’s consumption. There are places in Africa here where we set up camp once and all we could see at night was a landscape of dark space. If you look at the map at night, a global snapshot, we like to live in the dark holes between lights. And those are becoming ever-increasingly more difficult to find. Those same camps, they’ve now got, in the distance, an entire city of lights. There's a creep. It's inevitable and there's very little we can do about it.
The impact of humanity has taken its toll on these wonderful natural systems. Wildlife numbers are declining. When Beverly and I were born there were 450,000 lions, and today there are 20,000 lions. And that 95 percent decline in all of the natural capital, whether it's redwoods or sharks, or lions, or leopards, or elephants, kind of the same thing in our lifestyle, was 95 percent decline. And it's no longer sustainable. Project that forward and we're going to have 15, 25 years left, maybe, of present populations in these numbers, unless, a book like this or a film that we might do reaches a huge audience and paints a picture of how beautiful and how precious these places are. And how important they are to preserve. And that sort of is our mission in life. To use these images to make people absolutely fall in love and realize that we've got to work together to save it all.
Beverly Joubert: We actually give a lot of our books away to the individual countries where we are working in. To government officials, the president. So the decision-makers of each country will feel the same way as we do that these animals are worth saving. We've been very fortunate that a lot of our films have been shown at the UN. You really do need to reach the decision-makers ultimately to have policy change.
Can you talk to me a bit about the difference working between doing wildlife photography and filming versus other types of photography that are focused on other things.
Dereck Joubert: Yeah, there's no difference whatsoever. It doesn't really matter what's in the frame. Whether you photograph in the slums of Kibera outside of Nairobi, or whether you’re shooting the wildebeest migration. It's what's going on inside the frame, the storytelling within the frame. All great photographs extend beyond that. It's not just what's in the frame, it's what the next frame might be. The best example of this is a man walking down the street and he's about to step into the hole where a manhole cover has been removed. The audience or the viewer goes, “What's going to happen next?” It's a great image. If you have him falling through the hole and gone, the story's over. It's storytelling within a frame, and it's not capturing the frame. It's all about the storytelling captured in a moment and what it says about what happens next.
Beverly Joubert: Just to add to that, we often talk about creating an image. That doesn't mean that you must go in front of the camera and go and create that image and then you capture it. You really need to be open to the natural world, or to be open to working with cultures. Being open and being enthralled with what you're seeing in front of you—you really do have to have the excitement, the passion, of that day. Don't try and be somewhere else in your head. You need to be there, you need to be very present. And it's remarkable what you see and what you manage to capture because you are so much in that frame. For Dereck and I, we feel like we also have to capture within our films the emotions of that day, not only from us, but from what could be individual lion, leopard, or elephant herd. Because that's the only way that we'll be able to bring an audience in by them feeling the emotion, the similar emotion that we were feeling of that time. And it has to come from that image.
Dereck Joubert: And I think that a big danger within natural history and wildlife photography is that most people think that you are just capturing images. The lion's walking left to right, so you're going to capture that moment. But there's so much more within the toolbox of technique that you can use to capture it well or poorly. You can wait or maybe move around a little bit and get a glint in its eye, depending on where the sun is, and turn an average moment into a great moment. A gust of wind can come by and float its mane. You capture that and you've created something amazing out of it. Other examples: If the lion is walking towards you, you can frame him on the left as the wind is blowing his mane to the right. And the wind in the mane takes your eye into the frame. So, it's not just capturing. It's making the frame work for you to tell the story. And again, I would just say it's where it's a plane about to crash or a lion about to jump on an elephant.
Beverly Joubert: Be ready at all times in those moments!
