Meet Your Neighbours Seeks Conservation-Minded Photographers!

 

Professional nature photographers Niall Benvie (UK) and Clay Bolt (US) have announced a new project: Meet Your Neighbours. The project goal is to recruit photographers from around the world to document as many species as possible, both plants and animals, in their own backyards and neighborhoods.

Benvie and Bolt describe this grand project in this way-
"Common neighbourhood plants and animals are usually overlooked and undervalued, yet they are most people’s first, sometimes only, point of contact with wild nature. They matter for that reason if no other. They can make us feel better, let us see ourselves in perspective.

We want people to sit up and take notice of these wild neighbours by presenting them as celebrities: photographed in the white field studio, in exquisite detail under beautiful lighting. And we need photographers around the world to partner with us in this effort.

This project hinges on successful collaborations between photographers and their local conservation NGOs. We want to recruit photographers who already have good relations with the conservation community or who are able to use this project to build them. And we need the NGOs to put the work out there, in front of the public, in public spaces. You collaborate, identify the species to cover and create: they distribute.

MYN will initiate and support your negotiations with your nominated NGO to secure their funding for your work. Your responsibility is in the form of working with that NGO to ensure the best local dissemination of the work. That may include seeking grants from arts organisations, local authorities and companies to get the work out on the streets.

For this project to work well, we need contributors from all over the world: please feed this post into your networks. So, what about it? Are you in?

Please email us, clay@meetyourneighbours.org, with a brief bio., contact details of your partner NGO and let’s see if we can make this work.

It doesn’t matter whether you are a professional or a recreational photographer: what counts is a belief in the project and relationship with an NGO who will help you to get the work out into the community."

The deadline for the first round of applicants is 30th April 2010.

Text and photography copyright © Niall Benvie with Clay Bolt. All rights reserved.

Meet Your Neighbours: http://www.meetyourneighbours.org

Niall Benvie: http://www.imagesfromtheedge.com/

Clay Bolt: http://www.claybolt.com