The Journey Within was launched, to great acclaim, in October 2015. The book is a sequence of photographs taken from Dinesh Patel’s five decades of photography – quite literally, it is the lifetime’s achievement of a great photographer. Divided simply by regions of East Africa, and unadorned by text or explanations, the book guides its readers along one man’s journey, and testifies to his passion for wildlife and the world it lives in.
The breath-taking photos in the The Journey Within would lead one to believe that its author, Dinesh Patel, had been a professional photographer all his life. However, he took all his photos in the name of conservation, his first love, in order to raise awareness of the natural world – and used the income from his photographs to fund conservation projects.
Dinesh Patel was born in Nairobi in 1940 and was, from childhood, captivated by the world around us. Throughout his life, he made daring safaris around the region, and covered thousands of miles while visiting both the famous national parks and reserves, and the lesser known wilderness areas that few have even heard of. Having devoted his life to the conservation of the land he loved, he was rewarded by being made Honorary Game Warden of the Kenya Wildlife Service. Dinesh died a few months after the launch of his book, leaving us with this pictorial tribute to the environment he so loved.
Dinesh took up photography in order to document the drama and grandeur of the wildlife, and to raise awareness of the increasing threat to its survival. Throughout his life he was concerned about encroachment on the bush, and the impact of the reduction of wilderness areas on the wildlife that depends on it. However, his photos are much more than he perhaps intended. They capture a world and present it to his readers with clarity and beauty. The animals, too many of which are now listed as endangered species, are shown in their natural, majestic and – sometimes – savage way. Dinesh’s exceptional talent lights up every picture. The Journey Withinis not only a testament to the African wilderness that Dinesh strived to protect, but to the flair and passion of the man himself.
Interview with Teeku Patel
Teeku Patel, Dinesh’s younger son, was given a camera by his father when he was ten and has never looked back. He is now a professional photographer specialising in nature and landscape photography. A certified professional safari guide, Teeku leads photographic safaris and expeditions, and his photos can be seen in magazines and libraries around the world.
How has photography changed since your father started out?
My father started with a Kodak box camera and graduated to a Hasselblad in the mid-’70s. While he upgraded to newer technologies as they became available, he always used film and slides. On safaris, my job was to load up the film cartridges for my Dad’s Hasselblad. You only had 24 or 36 shots, and no one in Kenya could develop the film so he had to send them to Europe. It would be quite a long time before we got the negatives back.
While I held out using film for as long as I could, with advancing technology and the developing needs of the clients such as editing images on the go, it was a no-brainer to switch to digital. Now we have five different digital camera bodies.
How do you feel about following in the footsteps of such a well-respected photographer as your father?
My Dad saw wildlife photography as purely a hobby. He never made it his work. He held exhibitions with his prints and auctioned them off simply to give the funds back to conservation projects.
I have turned this hobby into my work. I do commercial photography, documentary work and specialised high-end prints, and I run photographic safaris and workshops. My Dad gave me a start or a platform with photography by giving me his old camera, and it was up to me to take it from there.
Where are you going from here?
We published the second version of my Dad’s book, The Journey Within, through our company Sokomoto Images. Getting into publishing was a whole new challenge – from learning how to do layouts, to text, to editing the images and finally to printing the book. I have yet to see where this new step will take me.
Tamara Britten, 29 May 2020
Published also in: The Link - Safarilink's inflight magazine
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