Winter Edition 2018

Hungry EYES
Photographer and alumnus of Marlborough College David Yarrow
talks to Susannah Warren about becoming a collectible artist, how to get
ahead in the age of Instagram and what makes a truly special picture
you fall in love
with someone, you
don’t fall in love with
them from 50 yards
“When
away. You fall in love
with them two foot away,” says fine art photographer
David Yarrow, who is renowned for his evocative
and immersive monochrome images of the natural
world. “The starting premise is always proximity.
And then the eyes are the most important. Eyes tell
a thousand stories.”
It is Yarrow’s talent for storytelling and his ability
to capture for posterity some of Earth’s most remote
landscapes, cultures and wildlife that has made him
one of the world’s most collectible photographers.
His pictures don’t just
happen, though. They are
meticulously thought out.
“Ninety-nine per cent of
photographs are taken. People
take photographs. Whereas I
think I make photographs. I
have a preconception in my
head already of what I’m going to get, rather than
turning up and seeing what’s going to happen.”
“Photography’s not about a camera, it’s about
putting yourself in the position to take a picture.
That access comes through lots of things, nothing to
do with photography: research, manners, patience…”
For example, Yarrow has just returned from a
shoot in Montana that has taken six years and ten
trips to pull off: “We did leave thinking, no one else
would know how to do these pictures.”
He is also attempting to become the first
Westerner to do a portrait of North Korean leader
“People take
photographs.
Whereas I think I
make photographs”
Kim Jong-un: “It requires
an awful lot of diplomacy,
teaching photography to kids in
Pyongyang – whatever it takes.”
It’s this dogged determination,
to go where no photographer
has gone before in an effort to
document something truly special and fresh, that
got him his career-defining picture. Taken in 2015,
Mankind captures a 25,000-strong Dinka cattle
camp in South Sudan. “With photographers, it
tends to be one image that really puts them on the
map,” he says. “I needed to go from being decent
and hard working and passionate to collectible, and
I knew that I had to take a big image from somewhere
that no-one else had been.”
To get the shot Yarrow made a perilous journey,
walking for hours in 42 degrees heat and wading
through crocodile-infested waters before winning