Yacine M'Seffar
In the summer of 2019 I joined Andre Paradis and his film crew for the production of season three of Roi Des Riviére. For three months of filming, often for 20 hours a day, we traveled to all corners of Quebec. From the rugged remote northern wilderness of the George river far above the treeline to the deep gorges of the Moisie River on the north shore of the St Laurence and the quiet, meandering, emerald green waters of the Jupiter River in Anticosti. The trials and tribulations of the whole production were tempered by extreme natural beauty and the dedication of the whole crew to the pursuit of capturing the Atlantic Salmon.
Reviled by so many, insects bite and sting and are seen as a nuissance. Yet insects are truly a marvel of nature. Ignored, crushed and avoided by us we some times fail to see how truly beautiful insects can be and how necessary they are to our survival. Silver Metamorphosis transforms insects into objects of beauty. by changing the organic to metallic, repulsion is replaced by fascination for these ancient beings that have been on Earth far longer than us.
My grand parents , Rene and Robin Fedden were prolific mountain climbers. After the second world war they traveled the world to different mountain ranges that had become wild again. In 1953 my grandfather wrote a book about their travels in the Catalan Pyrenees called The Enchanted Mountains. In 2011 my mother and I went in search of the route they had taken to find El Encatats ... The Enchanted Mountains.
Peter Beard set up a tented camp in the 1960's on the outskirts of Nairobi, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. Hog Ranch was a base for his safari's into the African wilderness not as a hunter but as a photographer. His many voyages allowed him to see how human encroachment had deeply affected the wilderness in western Africa over many decades. Once in the middle of wilderness, Hog Ranch is now part of a gated community in the edge of Nairobi, where wild animals still visit and warthogs, who give the ranch its name, still reside.
The sweeping grandeur of the breathtaking landscape. Each corner of our world has so many beautiful places... here are but a very very few.