Saturday 5th December 2009 until Sunday 10th January 2010 @ Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery, Bristol

I am a great appreciator of Bristol City Museum’s exhibitions - apparently even Brangelina visited for the Banksy indulgence. We the Bristol collective are gleaning fame.

Anyway, the day I visited the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2009 exhibit, my friend and I stopped first at a bench (naturally) in front of a slideshow of previous winners’ shots. A picture of a mountain goat flashes before us and a five-year-old next to us exclaims; ‘Oh, it’s a goat.’ Next up is a photograph with a view akin to the valley at the end of The Land Before Time but the constant zooming in takes away from these shots’ beauty and is a little patronising. There’s a wonderful shot entitled Terrapin Hot-Spot but this seems to bore the five-year-old, who is only interested in lions. Roar.

In this year’s display, The Full Lion with its bloody mane, in the Animal Portraits category is impressive but I prefer the highly commended Puffin In The Snow by Jan Vermeer. Andras Meszaros’ Raindrop Refresher is the winner of the unimaginatively titled Behaviour: All Other Animals category; it captures an ant drinking a drop of dew from a pink flower, which is kind of creepy but pretty amazing. There’s also the usual picture of hares fighting on another wall.

Two categories exist for young photographers - 10 years and under and 11-14 years – but, is it just me, does every 11-14 year old really holiday in Borneo and own an EOS–5D camera? The eminent child prodigies can’t have written the blurbs at least.

At the time, I think Jose Luis Rodriguez’s Storybook Wolf is a deserving overall winner but in the weeks since, there has been a delicious conspiracy spurred by other (perhaps jealous) wildlife photographers which asserts that the I-waited-many-years-for-this-shot-of-a-wolf-in- the-wild, is more like I-waited-many-years-for-a-shot-that-would-never-come-so-I-borrowed-a-wolf-and-paid-off-the-owners-alright? So, assuming allegations are true, my WILDlife photographer winner would have to be Penguin Looking At Human Tracks by Robert Friel as tweeted by the New Scientist pre-exhibition for a caption competition.

www.bristol.gov.uk

Sophie Collard