Peter Geraerts
committee member
Peter Geraerts is an amateur photographer living in Bedfordshire, with a love of both wildlife and landscape photography.
Wilderness is a word increasingly at odds with most of our modern lives. One definition refers to a region that is uncultivated, uninhabited and inhospitable. As the world population increases - more than doubling since he was born - we would expect that many of these areas of wilderness will come under increasing pressure to be inhabited and built upon.
There is now the increased opportunity to reach some of these places, often so much more quickly than our predecessors, and certainly with much less danger. Before that innocence is lost, we should take the time to appreciate the un-trampled beauty in front of us and try and look at the wilderness through the eyes of those pioneering explorers that first came upon them.
There are the most popular names of the more recent Polar explorers that we know such as Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen but there are many, many, others on the fringes much less well known but arguably no less adventurous. It’s not about the success or failure of these expeditions - it’s the fact that they were prepared to risk everything where there was no certainty of success.
Initially, when visiting some of these more remote places, his photography tended to represent more a record of what he saw. However, as he has experienced first hand, with awe, the scale and beauty of nature, he believes that has helped it develop further. This beauty is something that he has never nor will ever tire of.
That is what inspires him today and is what he wants to convey in his photographs.