On this episode, I sat down with David Chancellor, the award-winning documentary photographer behind ‘Hunters’, ‘Handle Like Eggs’, and the Taylor Wessing Prize-winning portrait ‘Huntress with Buck’, for a conversation about the moral grey areas of documentary photography, trophy hunting, wildlife conservation. David has spent decades photographing human-wildlife coexistence across Africa, sleeping beside trophy hunters for weeks at a time, documenting leopard hunting in Namibia that was later stopped, and turning the personal cost of that work, including the collapse of his marriage, into his most intimate project.
We talked about how beauty gets people to look at what they'd rather turn away from, why access matters more than gear, how a photographer builds trust over years instead of parachuting in, and his current project rewilding the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia with the National Center for Wildlife.
Watch this conversation and you'll understand how just one photograph can open a dialogue that could end an questionable pastime, and what it costs the person holding the camera.
Other things we discussed:
- Getting fired from foreign exchange dealing and talking his way into photography school with "below average" work
- The lion breeder who learned to see light and made the phone call behind the Taylor Wessing photo
- If it pays, it stays: the brutal economics of wildlife conservation
- The gamekeeper in Scotland whose hands kill deer and delivered his own son
- Whether he has gone numb after decades of watching animals die
- Photographing the birth, death, and compensation politics of community conservation in Kenya
- David Attenborough, his front door key, and the cost of a legendary life
- Film versus digital, the Mamiya 7, and why he shoots one consistent format
- AI, authenticity, and what photography loses when everything becomes content
Find David and his work online:
https://www.davidchancellor.com/
https://www.instagram.com/chancellordavid/
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