THURSDAY 04 MARCH 2021
‘More Travels Towards the Edge’
Sue O’Connell (FIPF ARPS EFIAP/d2 DPAGB BPE5*) and Peter Brisley (ARPS EFIAP DPAGB BPE2*)
It’s not the first time that husband and wife photographers Sue O’Connell and Peter Brisley have been to Tyndale Photography Club, on a previous visit their talk was entitled ‘Travels Towards the Edge’ and their recent talk took us on ‘More Travels Towards the Edge’.
Sue and Peter tend to travel to destinations not often visited by the majority of tourists, their travels seem to take them to ‘out of the ordinary’ countries and the images shown in this talk proved this by taking us to Mongolia, Iran, Brazil and India.
They shared the evening between them and Sue began with a documentary and highly descriptive photographs taken on two visits to Mongolia, a country where they found the travel and conditions hard but the photography very rewarding. From one visit she gave us a real insight into the lives of the camel herders in the stark and unforgiving Gobi desert. And in complete contrast, from another visit, the Golden Eagle Festival held in the far West of Mongolia, organised by The Mongolian Eagle Hunters. She concluded her part of the evening with several images taken from a tour they did around Iran.
After a break, where Sue answered the questions put to her by club members, Peter continued the talk by taking us to the Pantanal of Brazil and the state of Gujarat in Western India. The Pantanal is the world’s largest flooded grasslands and plays host to an enormous number of birds and several species of wildlife and although they do not class themselves as wildlife photographers the images they took of the birds, reptiles, otters, capybara and jaguars, to name but a few, were stunning. In complete contrast the colourful images of the tribes of Gujarat gave us an insight into the culture and ways of these nomadic people.
Even though Peter has had his work published in magazines and exhibitions and Sue has received numerous awards in salons and has been a winner several times in the Travel Photographer of the Year competition, they still consider themselves as ‘photographers who travel’ and not as ‘travel photographers’ – I am sure by the end of the evening each and every one of us was able to state which title we felt they should use.