From a high-school darkroom to first light in Botswana.
There is a photograph Gary Howe took years ago that he still rates above everything since. A leopard, asleep in the branches of a tree, perhaps 20 feet from where he was sitting.
"You've got this ferocious beast sitting in a tree," Howe said. "It was a massive surprise to see this. It was sort of unexpected, and what was so amazing is there's no motion in it. It's just totally relaxed. It's totally at peace with its life, and it's totally in its environment and totally untroubled by the fact that I'm 20 feet away, 30 feet away, taking photographs of it."
It has been with him a long time, he said. It was unique. And it is peaceful. That is a fairly exact description of what Howe looks for in a photograph, and of a photographic habit that has now run for more than four decades.
Two things pulled him in, and he is precise about both. "I like technology," Howe said, "and I like creativity in one form or another."
The technology came first, in a high-school darkroom. "You could go in there and mix all the chemicals and kind of see what revealed itself," he said. "I think the developing of it was as much fun as the photography itself. In some respects it's sort of like magic. You come in there with a blank film, and out pops a photograph that gradually emerges from the chemical waters."
The subject matter came from closer to home. Photography, he said, began as "a way to capture vignettes of time," mostly family and friends, "a visual memory of your life or people in your life." That is not a phase he has grown out of. The payoff arrives later: "You can look at something that happened five years ago, 10 years ago, and all of the emotion and sort of storyline surrounding that vignette come back to life."
Growing up in southern Africa put a different subject in front of him. "You can't help but have an appreciation of nature, the environment, wildlife," Howe said, "and whether that's wild animals who are frankly totally unpredictable, in a way that you can't necessarily anticipate. So every one of those experiences is different."
That unpredictability became the hook. "The real bug for me was wildlife photography," he said, "and the ability to capture these magnificent animals in their natural habitat." It also sets the working conditions, which are unforgiving. There is no time to work out settings once a scene opens up, so the thinking has to be done in advance.
He is candid that this runs against his own grain. "In a world where time seems to move more quickly, I would say I'm more impatient than patient," he said. Wildlife photography is, among other things, a way of finding that out about yourself.
Ask Howe what distinguishes his photography and he does not talk about equipment or subject. He talks about staying out of the way.
"My job is to be invisible," he said, "and to capture what's out there and what's happening around me in a way that doesn't disturb the natural environment in one form or another." He chooses the place, and he chooses "some of the subjects that I think are important and interesting to try and capture." Past that point his ambition is subtraction: he wants the animal photographed as it already was, "without much of my fingerprints to be seen around them."
Asked to describe his work to a stranger without a single technical term, he answered in one line. "It's capturing the moment in a way that is unaffected by my presence," Howe said.
"That invisible line is an important part of what I think is distinctive," he said. "You want to do it as an observer, not as a participant."
Almost nothing he shoots is staged, and he said so without disparaging the alternative. "I think other people have done phenomenal jobs creating scenes which are quite amazing," he said. "That's not something that I do."
Two of those other people he names as influences. One is Peter Beard, whose work he called "a mix of people and wildlife and sort of wild environments, somewhat bohemian in many respects." Beard also supplies his oldest regret. Newly arrived in the United States in the early 1990s, Howe saw a Beard print in a gallery, priced within reach, and talked himself out of it. He went back a week later. Someone else had bought it. The other is David Yarrow, admired precisely for the thing Howe does not do. "He curates his scenes," Howe said, "but just the way he does it is in my mind very unique, and very smart in terms of how he draws you into it."
For anything that moves quickly, Howe shoots Canon, and has followed the system through every generation of it. "I've gone through the Canon evolution from film to DSLR to mirrorless," he said, and he upgrades bodies every few years to take the benefit of what has been engineered into them, from eye detection to image stabilization. More recently he added a Hasselblad, "the Ferrari of cameras" in his description, for a newer set of interests in cityscape and landscape work.
He resists the language of the photo shoot. "I don't really think of setting up per se," Howe said. "I set up more timing, environment, backdrop." In practice that means place, hour, and light, and the hour is almost always early. "Early morning in my mind is always the best, because the debris of the day hasn't necessarily yet gone through the environment. So it's all fresh, it's all clear. You've got dewdrops. You've got sun coming up slowly." The light will not wait: shoot at one moment, and "15 minutes later the light has sort of evolved and changed."
Light is the discipline he rates above the others. "If you get the light wrong, what looked like a great scene doesn't look nearly as good as what you saw through your eye," he said. "But if you get the light right, it's phenomenal."
He edits his own work in Lightroom and calls himself "a very amateur user of it," which undersells a clear philosophy. "You don't want to change the character of the photograph," Howe said. "I want it to be, call it, 90% a representation of what we took, and maybe 10% sort of clean up." Cropping he treats as the genuinely creative part of editing, a way to draw attention to something in a scene he had not fully appreciated at the time.
On artificial intelligence he is measured. He uses it for light post-production, and has seen generative work that impresses him without persuading him. "Not sure I necessarily subscribe to that personally," he said, before adding the caveat of someone who watches technology closely: ask again in six or 12 months and the answer may be different.
Cityscape and landscape work is the newest part of his photography, and it grew out of pictures taken in Cape Town and in Venice. Both taught him more than he expected at the time, and both are pushing him toward something longer: a project of photographing cities at first light to work out what each one gives a camera that no other place does.
Any honest account of a photographic life includes the misses, and Howe volunteers his.
The most recent was in Botswana. A mother leopard, her year-old cub up a broken tree, gentle rain, the sun just coming up, and a herd of some 15 elephants moving across the plain toward them. "It was one of those scenes where I was like, where do I look?" Howe said. He knew the frame he wanted: the elephant passing the cub, the two crossing. He got everything before it and everything after it. At the moment they met, his memory card filled.
He is philosophical, and characteristically comparative, about the arithmetic. "There's an element of photography that's a little bit like venture capital, which is you take lots of shots, and most of them don't work out," he said. "But the one or two that do work out, out of the 100 photographs that you take, are just so worth all the time and effort." Then the other analogy, closer to home: "maybe it's a little bit like golf as well, where you have that one shot and you're like, I love the sport, and then you have 10 where you just feel like, why the hell do I do this."
So the practice is "gratifying when you get it right, but so humbling that it takes so many goes to get it right." The fact that he keeps going, he said, means the reward outweighs the frustration. And the most honest thing photography has taught him about himself is simply persistence. "You might not get it today. You might not get it this week," Howe said. "But if you keep trying and keep learning from what you have tried to do, you'll get to a better place over time."
Wildlife stays at the top of the list. Landscape is the growth area, and he has a shortlist: Namibia and its deserts, Iceland, Mongolia. Macro photography is newer and further down, an interest in flowers and insects, "relatively small items that you really can't appreciate unless you take a photograph of them and sort of blow it up."
He also takes a great many photographs he never planned to, which is the quiet gift of the phone in his pocket. He remembers being baffled by the idea. "I was like, why on earth would I need a camera on my phone? I've got these beautiful other cameras," Howe said. Now he credits it with catching things he would otherwise have noticed and walked past, among them an evening in New York when, as he described it, the setting sun lined up exactly with the streets.
The camera has also given him a role among friends. A group of them are serious kite-surfers; Howe has appointed himself their photographer. "I'm not going to do the crazy kite surfing stuff," he said, "but I'll take photographs of you jumping 25 feet in the air." They get to see themselves do it. He gets to be in the water with a camera. He calls it a melding of two worlds.
Howe has no professional ambitions for any of this, and says so with some relish. "I'm an enthusiastic amateur, which I think is a great place to be," he said. The best piece of advice he has been given is to bring "a beginner's mind" to the work: come at it from the bottom up, and you see things you would not otherwise have seen. It comes with a condition he stated plainly. "You have to enjoy this," Howe said. "You have to get pleasure out of it in order for it to be worthwhile."
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