MAYBE IT’S the record-breaking British summer temperatures that have turned Yorkshire’s moist green pastures into dry, yellow straw, or simply because it’s the next location on his annual schedule, but Oliver Wright seems to be longing for the cooler autumn air and shady forests of northern Sweden. “I’m going there this September as a tourist for a little while, and then I’m coming back here for a bit,” he says. “I’ve got a work visa, so I’ll be back in Sweden working from the middle of November to the end of March.” An image of long, dark nights, sub-zero temperatures, frozen lakes and snow as far as the eye can see doesn’t seem plausible while we speak in the middle of a drought in 35°C heat, but Oliver likes variety in his photography and is used to going from one extreme to the other in his pursuit of photogenic subjects that cover a wide range of genres…
Your work is very diverse – landscape, wildlife, macro, astrophotography. Is that variety your strength as a photographer?
I definitely move through different genres and I really enjoy doing all of those you mention. I think it’s helped me. I’ve done studio photography as well, I’ve done architectural photography, and if I’m taking a picture within York Minster – an architectural photo – sometimes I’ll look at a macro subject and at the symmetry in the same way as I would with an architectural image. I could be framing a landscape image, and what I’ve learned from that compositionally I’ll bring into macro as well.
So, the creative disciplines can overlap from one subject
