For the last four years the California Academy of Sciences has been hosting an annual Natural World Photography Competition and displaying the winners and finalists in their "BigPicture" show, where each color photograph is more spectacular than the next.
One cannot fail to admire the industry and inhuman patience of these intrepid photographers from around the world who trek to remote parts of the planet. They bring back close-ups of rare creatures and amazing sights most of us will never have the opportunity to experience for ourselves, like a grown man in a panda costume cradling a giant panda cub at a Chinese wildlife preserve; dolphins pointed nose-down, listening for fish on the ocean floor; a juvenile cardinalfish in the black depths of the ocean hiding out in a fire-engine-red sea anemone, a predicament whose drama was heightened by a strobe and red backlighting that blew its cover; and the arrival of a dazzling bolt of lightning in human form illuminating stormy skies for an instant over the pock-marked Vermilion Cliffs, which look like they've been there since the beginning of time.
There are some sights, however, one would rather not be forced to confront. Britta Jaschinski's "Confiscated," which was awarded the Grand Prize, is a horrifying photograph of a pair of enormous elephant feet that have been turned into footstools. Once attached to a majestic animal that was slaughtered and dismembered for profit, the body parts, shown here on a parked trolley, are among the 1.3 million smuggled items seized by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and stored in a Colorado warehouse. Shot in somber elephant-grey tones, the image attests to grotesque atrocity and the human greed and barbarity that has devastated the species and is rapidly leading to its extinction. Too bad it's not the poachers who are vanishing from the face of the earth.
Most of the show's photographs, though, elicit wonderment rather than outrage. Franco Banfi and his diving team were incredulous when they came upon a giants-only slumber party under the cerulean blue Caribbean Sea. His "Synchronized Sleepers" are a pod of sperm whales hanging vertically and snoozing just below the water's surface like alien cargo dropped from a spaceship or a marine mammal version of a sleepytime underwater ballet. (Banfi has also been known to swim with markedly less friendly 26-foot-long anacondas.) According to research data, the whales spend 7% of their day taking brief naps; it's the only time they can catch some shut-eye.
For "The More the Merrier," Alexandre Bonnefoy caught a rumble in the jungle, a gaggle of macaques with expressive, remarkably human-like, pink faces and grey fur congregating on Shodoshima Island, Japan. If you didn't know better you'd think you were viewing a class picture of rambunctious middle-schoolers, standing three lines deep and mugging for the camera. You can almost pick out the characters: The cut-ups; a vain one preening and tilting her head; the gentle soul, the worry wart, the good-time boys and the hangers-on; another with eyes closed. They're grouped in a formation known as the monkey dumpling, a behavior apparently common among the 23 species of matriarchal macaques that huddle together on cold days, trading personal space for warmth.
Ray Collins quit his job as a coal miner to pursue fresh air and the fury of the ocean. He usually can be found floating, camera-ready, in saltwater, where he feels most at home, but lately he's taken to leaning out of helicopters and shooting wave formations "on their journey to dissipation," which is how he grabbed the stunning photographs in his "God's-Eye View" series, winner of the competition's Aerial Photography category. In one particularly breathtaking image, all the more astonishing because Collins has been colorblind since birth, he captured an exploding emerald-green waterfall in the middle of the ocean, a wave of such astounding brute force it generates its own weather system of frothing water as it rolls along to the end of the line in New South Wales, Australia. It's heart-stopping to behold as long as it's not crashing down on you.
Though it's almost always better to see creative work in person, the installation lighting in the museum is a tad bright and doesn't show off the photographs to best advantage. There's additional supplemental information at the exhibit, but the black background and high resolution found in the online gallery slide show ( www.bigpicturecompetition.org/2017-winners) makes for a more dramatic presentation. But if you do forego the visit to CAS, you'll miss Claude, the Zen albino alligator who lays motionless in his swamp oblivious to the cacophony of screaming kids and tour-guide lecturers. How does the boy do it?
Through Oct. 29. calacademy.org