Queer Nature Photography Awards 2024
"Bachelors"
Savannah Rose
"Bacherlors''
Garden snails are simultaneous hermaphrodites - each individual has both male and female sexual organs. This means any two mature individuals can mate, which is a clear advantage when you consider finding a mate in the first place can’t be easy. Active at night, with limited senses of sight and hearing they rely mostly on touch and taste to sense one another. On meeting, the snails “dance” circling around each other and engaging in elaborate touching and tasting before lining up their genitals and exchanging sperm packets. In its entirety, the mating ritual can last up to 12 hours. As garden snails are typically nocturnal I decided to photograph them in the dark, using a UV lamp as the only light source. Their mucus fluoresces a brilliant blue-green - striking against the dark background of the garden furniture. I like the idea that a small creature often overlooked as mundane or everyday can shine when seen (literally and metaphorically) in a different light. I also wanted to play with the sense of time in the image, capturing the beautiful details and recognisable features of the snails in a shorter exposure and overlaying this with a longer exposure to capture the long, fluid, kind of messy nature of the snail interactions.
About the Photographer
Name: Savannah Rose
Age: 29
Nationality: originally from the United States, living in Jackson, Wyoming. Rose identifies as a bisexual woman.
How does your identity influence your work?
I believe that essentially photography is about seeing the world through the eye of an individual. Wildlife photography has long been dominated by men and as a woman- a queer woman- I feel that my work reflects wild spaces in a way that is consistent with my identity and viewpoint. I hope that who I am as an individual human being is conveyed in my portraiture of wildlife and sets it apart from other photographers.
What message do you hope to convey with your work about the intersection of queerness and biodiversity in nature?
Nature has taught me much about the fluidity of life and diversity on the grandest scale imaginable. Life is so much more complex than the rigidity we humans have assigned to it. I strive to be genuine and have integrity in the stories I capture- portraying the realities of what I see- and that often involves facets of biodiversity including queerness. I’ve observed this in a large variety of species including cougars, moose, American bison, and bighorn sheep.
What do you think is the importance of highlighting diversity in both nature and society, and how can photography play a role in this?
Wildlife will teach us lessons about ourselves if we let it- we are not so divorced from the wild as we believe and we are animals ourselves. By observing and appreciating diversity in nature, and the lack of binary that exists outside the walls of our own creation, we can apply these lessons to ourselves and our society. Photography can help convey these lessons to people who might not otherwise ever get a chance to see it for itself.
What is your favorite example of queerness in nature?
My personal favorite example of queerness in nature will always be a mountain lion I spent several years documenting at the end of her unusually long life- a life that gave quite a bit of insight to researchers on her species while she was collared and even after through persistent tracking and camera trapping to observe her behavior. She was documented in a same-sex pairing with another lion and this footage was later used in a groundbreaking paper that illustrated same sex behavior in Puma concolor. For me personally, she will always be my wild icon of bisexuality that resonates with me.
A note from the Narwhal Rainbow Alliance
There is no specific data regarding the percentage of homosexual behavior among moose. In other deer species (cervids), homosexual behavior has been observed in approximately 10% of males. Further research is needed to arrive at a more reliable estimate. Moose populations exhibit relatively high biodiversity, particularly in North America. These populations are stable or even growing in certain parts of their range, though regional differences and threats exist that could impact biodiversity and population numbers.