This photograph won the BBC Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year overall competition in 2008 and something about the image just strikes me.
There are a million and one internet articles about successful composition from the rule of thirds, to using leading lines. All of this boils down to controlling the way the eye moves through the photograph. However, this simply tells you how to make a pretty photograph, not a work of art.
When I look at this photograph I can feel my eyes being moved around the photograph but it is not simply this that makes it art, but to explain why it is I need to explain how my eyes move.
The first thing I see is the chase scene in the middle of the image. By being in the middle of the photograph this breaks the most often cited compositional rule; "do not put the subject in the center of the frame". Luckily, in this case the eye does not dwell but is first drawn to the almost silhouetted line of Oryx in the foreground, before being drawn back to the chase by the gaze of the Oryx. Lastly, I pick up the almost hidden line of Oryx in the background, again looking at the chase.
Even though the Oryx are looking at the lion because herbivores need to keep track of predators, to me their gaze and positioning conjures the image of a Roman amphitheater, where the Oryx are the fascinated spectators.
To me nature is a fascinating but deadly spectacle, one that we can all enjoy, sometimes with morbid fascination, but one in which we are all intrinsically involved.
This is what art is to me. A photograph, poem, or painting, a song, book, or rock drawing is art if it says something about the world outside its form to the reader.
Every single nature photograph does this to me. Nature photographs remind me that the repetition of the simple process of evolution has produced a completely interrelated and completely ecologically interdependent web of life on a planet sculpted by the simple laws of physics.
This to me is completely inspiring. This to me is art.
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