The New Big 5 is an international project I started working on in 2019. The ‘big five’ is an old term used by colonial-era hunters in Africa for the most prized and dangerous animals to shoot and kill: elephant, rhino, leopard, Cape buffalo and lion. I thought there was a better idea: to celebrate the animals that we share the planet with using photography, rather than hunting.
I first had the idea of a new big five of wildlife photography around a decade ago, when I was on assignment in Botswana’s Makgadikgadi Pans. Maybe it was hearing the word ‘shooting’, used for taking pictures, that sparked something, but the genesis was more from thinking about the idea that trophy hunting is an outdated concept, something that belongs to the past, and that wildlife photography is much more meaningful to people these days.
