PARTING SHOT | Capturing wild moments

Print head: Ten years of witnessing — a photographic tribute to nature’s enduring appeal.

Print subhead: Margot Raggett’s anniversary edition reveals astonishing beauty and accelerating fragility of nature and its inhabitants.

Print pullquote: Rediscovered moments of unguarded animal life

10 Years of Remembering Wildlife, the latest and most ambitious volume in Margot Raggett’s groundbreaking conservation series, is a photography book that demands a seat at the coffee table. It’s a decade-long reminder of the astonishing beauty of the wild world and the accelerating fragility of it.

Begun after Raggett, then a working wildlife photographer, encountered a freshly poached elephant in Kenya. Her response wasn’t despair but action: a call to arms to her colleagues — some of the world’s best wildlife photographers — to donate images that capture the wild so well that they might convince the most nonchalant city dweller to give a damn.

The project has always been rooted in the urgency of conservation. Ten books later, the series has raised over $1.5m (R25.86m) for conservation, and has built a global community of artists, readers and activists.

This anniversary edition is the largest yet — 200 pages of hand-selected images chosen from the series’ earlier volumes on elephants, rhinos, great apes, cheetahs, lions, African wild dogs, bears, leopards and tigers. Some photographs are iconic, the kind that ricocheted across the world when their volumes were first released; others feel like rediscovered moments of unguarded animal life. Together, they form a tapestry of ten years of witnessing — a tribute to nature’s enduring appeal.

New to this edition is a section that feels both celebratory and grave: pangolins. The world’s most trafficked mammal, a creature at once armoured and vulnerable, is photographed here with an almost reverent respect.

These images — most never seen before — are the heart of the book, and an attempt to counter the violence facing the species. Every copy sold will directly support pangolin protection projects.

Contributions come from giants of the field — Marsel van Oosten, Frans Lanting, Greg du Toit, and Jonathan and Angela Scott, who also wrote the foreword — alongside 20 winning entries from a recent global competition.

Perhaps the magic of 10 Years of Remembering Wildlife is that it’s more of a promise than a memorial. A reminder in precious captured moments that wild, heart-stopping beauty is still out there and worth fighting for — and that the wild, if we choose it, can still be remembered forward, not just backwards.