photography
Kurt S Müller
“If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
It all began with dreams and a passion for life. Born in Switzerland, naturalised in Britain with my eyes firmly set on distant horizons.
I was named after a friend of the family who died in an avalanche aged 24, whilst ski touring. Kurt, in the Turcik language is a surname meaning Wolf. My full name Kurt Müller is the most common name in Switzerland.
My most delightful achievement was helping my wife to bring up my two daughters and to pursue my career, which has taken me around the world a few times. In my limited spare time I pursued my great passion - mountaineering and ski-touring. How much of this passion could I take into the next stage of my life, once my fitness started to fail? How can I continue to have my adrenalin kicks?
The answer turned out to be photography - wildlife photography specifically. I have already met a hyper 4-month old male leopard called Zulu. I even paid to be locked up with him in his cell, even though the wardens gauged it to be too risky, in the hyper mood he was in at the time. The half hour encounter ended without bloodshed.
The converted Toyota on the left
created a lot of excitement in the
Masai Mara National Park - no backdoors.
The low angle provides very lifelike
wildlife images. Meanwhile, the idea
has been widely copied.
With the help of two snake handlers, I took a black
mamba for a walk in the park in South Africa.
It's also where a white stork attacked my camera
lens, luckily not my eyes. It felt threatened by my
camera being pointed at it repeatedly and photographed.
My experience tells me that it's better to kiss snakes
than be kissed by them. A young and beautiful 2 m
long Burmese python was my first victim.
Accidentally stepping on snakes is best avoided. Lucky for me, the one I stepped on was a harmless grass snake in the vicinity of Zürich, where I grew up. A much more dangerous snake, the Bushmaster ostensibly the longest venomous snake was however, close enough to me to step on. I missed a rare opportunity. It dared encroach on my private sphere. However it unerringly moved on in the direction of Machu Picchu. I have encountered countless more venomous snakes including rattle snakes and vipers in their habitats in the US, Switzerland etc. One snake in Thailand had installed itself in a public toilet (a male toilet).
A water snake in a stalactite cave forced a young lady into a screaming fit. She was on my rope exploring a cave in Borneo.
Lucky for me I found a snake zoo which allows me to photograph snakes of all sorts including the green mamba, the boomslang, cobras and others out of their snake tanks, in the open.
Apart from snakes, I was also really interested in indigenous people when I was at school. Meanwhile I have a great fascination of such people. I rarely undertake a journey without visiting tribes. No short tourist visits but more meaningful trips where I can talk to tribal members and learn about their lives, customs etc.
An example of such a visit was my recent trip to the Suri tribe in SW Ethiopia, at the border with war-torn South Sudan. A flight via Adis Ababa led to Jimma. Another day's journey on pothole infected dirt roads brought me into the region of Milan Teferi. It's a no-go area without an armed escort. My bodyguard (pictured), never left my side. A mobile camp which is driven into the area by your team, is your only accommodation. The Suri are illiterate. Yet a Kalashnikov is every man's weapon. Presents for the Suri
hosts are welcome, the men prefer ammunition. What most of the tribes really
need though, is clean drinking water. This area is a very unsettled region,
often the scene of civil wars.
Hence the machine guns, which are prevalent in many parts of Ethiopia. There is
also historic enmity amongst many of the tribes who steal each other’s cattle and
women and occasionally kill each other. To toughen up the men, they hold
stick fights.
Most of the tribes I visit are nomads - their future most uncertain.
Currently some 3500 dams worldwide are either planned or under construction.
Many of these are in Africa, and will completely change and/or destroy the
habitat of many of the tribes.
Logically, the best place to photograph wild cats is ...in the wilderness. However,
in Kent South England, they have a wild cat sanctuary where injured wild cats
from all over the world are rehabilitated. I know a British photographer who has
the rights to get really close to these cats for photography. It is an amazing
experience. Staff instruct you to move back, once a cat is 1 m from the only
fence between you and the cat. Well since I take most of my photos lying
down for a good angle, I was sometimes a bit slower. Because I was the only
one lying down during our photoshoot, the cats always eyed me up as easy
meat.
During the years that I had a contract with a company located in Phoenix,
Arizona, I strolled down to the Colorado river in the Grand Canyon nine times
and managed to get back up to the South rim, North rim respectively. On one
occasion I was on an eventful 15 hr hike down Hermit Trail to the river, then
back on the Tonto trail joining up with Bright Angel Trail and back up to the
South Rim Village. On the way down, when I reached the Colorado River
at 8 am, I figured I deserved a sandwich for s late breakfast. I took a bite and
had to spit it out. I could no longer swallow food. The extreme dryness at the bottom of the Grand Canyon National Park had almost closed my oesophagus. I survived on dried food and nuts for the rest of the day. When I arrived back at the village, it was a delight to remove my boots. My feet were steaming! Shock horror when I took my right sock off and saw the sole of my foot suspended from my heel. A 2mm layer of skin had almost totally detached itself from the rest of my foot. It was hanging there by a thread in front of my eyes like a sock on a washing line. I hobbled around in great pain for the next 2 days, until the skin reattached itself.
At age 18 I joined my first climbing expedition to Northern Norway. Like Africa, Scandinavia and the Arctic countries are my favourite destinations. 2017 was my Greenland year. I liked the West coast so much that I joined a small sailing boat full of photographers into one of the largest and most remote fjords on the East Coast soon after.
My friend Phil's Grumman Cheetah was one of my early love affairs. We spent many hours in the air together. The ultimate adventures were our two flights from Vancouver to Alaska. Some 3500 km along the Pacific coastline. We circled Denali in 1972 when we found out that seven climbers attempting the 6000 m peak, the highest in North America, perished in one disastrous week. During that time I was ski-touring in the Yukon.
In 2016 I spent a month in Antarctic waters, along
Antarctic convergence where the sea temperature
changes by 3degC.
For over three weeks, my home was the tiny
little MS Hans Hanssen. Barely 26.5m long
we almost circumvented South Georgia Island
in it - home to a million king penguins and
nearly two million macaroni penguins and lots
more.
I photographed Arctic terns too, which
undertake one of the most incredible migrations
from Northern Europe to Antarctica and back.
Each weighs just 100 gr. In 2016 six of them
were equipped with a 0.7 gr GPS model. Only
one returned 9 months later, after a journey of
96,000 km. A distance of 2.5 times around the
equator.
They breed in Olafsvik, Snæfellsnes peninsula in Iceland. Many tourists go too close to the breeding grounds and are attacked by dive bombing terns that descend on people's scalps like crazy kamikaze pilots.
One highlight in 2019 was the moment when we found ourselves in a RIB boat smack bang in the middle of a pod of 100 common dolphins, off the coast of Africa. They were racing at breakneck speed (their top speed is around 60km/hr), slicing their way through the warm and churning Atlantic waters perhaps 25,000 ft above the floor of the Mid-Atlantic ridge. Trying to keep up with them, the RIB was at its maximum speed bouncing over the 1.6m swell. Taking pictures was a bit of a challenge but the experience was breathtaking. The dolphins were either hunting or had been stalked by whales. We never found out.
In the second Corona year I visited a very small 0.03 km2 volcanic plug a few km ENE of Edinburgh. Richard Attenborough calls this tiny island one of his 12 wildlife wonders of the earth. During the mating season Bass Rock is home to 150,000
gannets - perhaps 10% of the world’s total. Gannets are very aggressive, also against people. Only a few photographers are allowed to visiteach year. To get to the old ruins from a hermit who lived there in the 1600s, we followed a narrow path blocked entirely by thousands of gannets-some moved some didn’t. All of them tried to bite your legs. They succeeded four times in my case, more surprising are the in-flight
bumps that they inflicted on me. One even flew into my camera lens and a few times I had to duck to avoid being hit in the head.
Few of the professional wildlife photographer that I know, are financially successful. It's a great challenge. Lucky for me, I can look at photography as a hobby and not a profession. Even then you can occasionally have a very small measure of success. Always bearing in mind what George Bernard Shaw said about picture takers: “A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.”
The Guardian Newspaper in England has a daily circulation of 140,000. On its centre spread, double page, it printed my chameleon catching a fly in Namibia, in August 2019. The same image appeared in at least six other countries, as well as the Namibian press itself.
On the same day, the world's largest online newspaper, MailOnline with 62 million registered readers (in 2nd spot is the NYT with 42 million) carried an article with five of my chameleon pictures.
The biggest English language newspaper in China had one of my articles on hippos in Kenya.
Some months later a photo sequence of an interaction between three immature cheetahs with a Thomsons gazelle, that I photographed in the Masai Mara in Kenya, appeared on the US TV news channel Fox TV (3 million viewers). The Times in England showed one shot of the same sequence, which also sold in Australia.
The photoZURICH20 exhibition is held annually with around 30,000 visitors. One of Europe's leading photo printing businesses sponsored some of my pictures as well as exhibitions in Saas Fee. A couple of British photo agencies sell on my behalf.
I assume that I was and still am, a well-liked guest on Swiss/Lufthansa, bearing in mind that I reached their highest frequent flyer status - the champagne class. These are real bons-viveurs. This EXTREME category of frequent flyers spends most of their valuable time above 10,000 meters, disregarding the warnings that the body needs water at such altitudes in preference to champagne. I am surely the most active supporter of this club and lay claim to the fact that I have drunk more champagne in the tropopause region than 99% of mankind. It's the pilots that might make up the other on percent! This should explain why, on embarking I'm always welcomed with the most sparkling smiles by the cabin crew.
'Only the one who walks his own way can't be overtaken'
Marlon Brando
equipment: Nikon 810 with Nikon accessories
all rights: Kurt S Müller