GOING THE EXTRA MILE
‘With an animal of menace you want to
have the camera lower than their eye-level’
from his hobby to do more than pay the bar bill at the student union. ‘I always loved my football and grew up when Celtic had a great side
and even though we were a Protestant family I just wanted to support the best,’ he says. ‘I started to photograph a bit of football and before I knew it, when I was 20 I ended up being sent to photograph Scotland in the World Cup in Mexico. It was very challenging, mainly because I wasn’t very good and because a lot of the matches were played under high midday suns, which means it’s very difficult to get the textures into players’ faces. But in the final, I got the definitive shot of Maradona lifting the World Cup, which became an iconic image. That was a big moment.’ Despite spending much of his university career behind the goal at
Tynecastle, Easter Road and Parkhead, he soon realised the limitations of such structured photography, so instead moved into finance. ‘The reality in sports photography is that, with the camera equipment
being so good now and up to 250 photographers at big games, it’s very difficult to get an image that other people haven’t got. To try and get pictures that are sufficiently different that they transcend generic stuff is more and more of a challenge. That is what I’ve tried to do in Encounter.’ Although a willingness to sacrifice personal comfort, and a persis-
tence that meant he would fly to South Africa for five or six weekends in a year to get the perfect shot, were important on an odyssey that took him to often perilously remote locations on six continents, this part-time photographer also pioneered techniques that yielded images that have made his professional counterparts sit up and take notice. His work with remote-controlled cameras is genuinely ground breaking. Unprecedented close-ups of a lioness, elephant and rhino formed
the centrepiece of the book. Yarrow researched his subjects’ habits, then scented the camera with the animal’s defecation to attract them before placing it in their likely path, remotely operating the shutter from as little as 50 yards away. Having the camera on the ground also helps because ‘with an animal of menace you want to have the camera lower than their eye-level, and that’s impossible to do if you’re holding the camera’. The results were remarkable. ‘I tried to challenge convention. Far too
many people photograph wildlife with a long lens that gives you very dull images. If you take a photo of a beautiful woman you don’t photo- graph her from a hundred yards away, you photograph her from a foot and a half away. It should be the same with animals. Robert Capa, the great war photographer, said “If a picture is not good enough, you are not close enough” and I totally subscribe to that.’ Encounter has been a success on every level. Conservation charity The
Tusk Trust, which gets 10 per cent of sales, has benefited from some of his images selling for $25,000, with his photographic turnover reaching $1.3 million in the first six months of this year from a standing start. ‘The fact that people are willing to pay for my work is important to
me,’ says Yarrow. ‘Rather than saying “I’m going to make some art and see if anyone wants it”, it’s actually better to look at it the other way round and ask “What do people want?”. There’s nothing vulgar about trying to make ends meet by addressing what sells and what doesn’t.’ And if there’s one thing that’s for certain, it’s that Yarrow’s extraordi-
nary images sell.
Image: Using a remotely-operated camera at ground level helped Yarrow photograph white rhinos at Lewa in Kenya.
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