TITLE: Elder

Photographed at close range at a wildlife park, this male gelada baboon met the camera with a stillness that stopped the moment cold. The gelada — endemic to the Ethiopian Highlands and among the most socially complex of all primates — carries in its face something that resists easy categorisation as animal. The massive mane, the hooded eyes, the absolute composure: this is not a creature caught unawares but one choosing, on its own terms, whether you are worth its attention. The answer, it seems, is uncertain. Shot in monochrome to strip away the distraction of colour and push the tonal rendering of fur and skin to its limits, the image asks the viewer to sit with a gaze that is older, and possibly wiser, than their own.

AUTHOR: Cliff Spooner (United Kingdom)

Cliff's photography defies easy categorisation, which is precisely the point. A geologist by training, he reads landscapes the way most people read faces — for what lies beneath the surface, for the tension between structure and erosion, for the story that only deep time tells. That habit of looking has shaped everything he shoots.
His competitive record spans wildlife, landscape, abstract, street, and digital art across PAGB, FIAP, PSA, and RPS frameworks, with distinctions including ARPS. He's as comfortable stalking critically endangered spoon-billed sandpipers on the mudflats of Thailand's Gulf Coast as he is constructing a composed studio nude or building a displacement-processed architectural abstract in post. The common thread isn't genre — it's an obsession with formal rigour and the point at which a photograph stops being a record and starts being something else entirely.
The art nude series submitted here grew from that same instinct. Light as geology — raking, revealing, unforgiving. The body treated not as subject but as terrain: ridgelines, shadow valleys, the slow arc of a form emerging from darkness. Black-and-white was never in question. Colour would have been a distraction from the thing itself.
Away from the camera, Cliff sails — which teaches you, among other things, that conditions are rarely what you planned for and that the interesting picture usually happens when you've just put the camera away. He also performs in amateur stage productions, which turns out to be surprisingly useful training for directing a subject: knowing when to give instruction, when to stay quiet, and when the moment you wanted has already passed.
The sea, the stage, the studio, the shoreline. Different disciplines with the same underlying question — what does it take to hold someone's attention, and for how long?