Because I work part-time in a bookstore, people often ask me if I’ve read anything good lately. My favorite book of the past year had about 3 pages of text in total as an introduction. The rest of the several hundred page book is portraits — animal portraits by UK photographer Andy Rouse.
There are traditional wildlife photos of the big cats, great apes, and so forth. But then there are the images that took my breath away as I tried to figure out what was happening in the picture or understand how such emotion could be captured on a page. In particular look for the mammoth head of an East African Cape buffalo covered by insect-eating birds or the red-eyed lepilemur blending into the multicolored bark of a Madagascar tree.
I found the book on a remainder’s shelf for just a couple of bucks, but I would have happily paid full price. Seek it out in a bookstore or at your public library.
Andy Rouse’s website: http://www.andyrouse.co.uk/
Words + Images 