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Dec 11, 2020

Endangered Rangers Virtual Event

We are pleased to announce that David Yarrow will be speaking at the Endangered Rangers Event on Sunday the 13th of December.
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Nov 10, 2020

Space for Giants Charity Campaign

We are delighted to announce our collaboration with Space for Giants and Adrian Steirn on an exciting campaign - #artforgiants - with the London Evening Standard and the Independent to…
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Sep 21, 2020

World Rhino Day

This World Rhino Day, WildAid is delighted to share a good news story with you...
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May 05, 2020

Art For Heroes

In April 2020, David Yarrow released an exclusive image to support ‘Art For Heroes’, the virtual art exhibition set up by Maddox Gallery. Like everyone in the UK, we feel enormous…
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Apr 29, 2020

Harper’s Bazaar x Yarrow, Rwanda

Go behind the scenes of David Yarrow's Harper's Bazaar shoot in Rwanda...
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Feb 13, 2020

Letter From Kangaroo Island, Australia

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Feb 13, 2020

The #KoalaComeback Campaign Support

There is no use having a voice if not to speak out on important issues and I am grateful this week that our message has been amplified a thousand times…
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Feb 13, 2020

Upcoming Events – February

February 19th - Casterline Goodman Gallery, Aspen
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Feb 13, 2020

Recent Events – January

I was honoured to be asked to give the Keynote speech at the UBS Leaders' Forum in Orlando, Florida in early January.
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Latest from Instagram

The Thundering Herd Looking back at my 38 years of holding a camera, there have been a few key moments along the way. Maradona in 1986 being my initial prompt. But it was probably way later in 2014 when I took the picture Mankind in a cattle camp near Yirol in South Sudan that my life changed. To borrow from Eddie Cantor “it took me 30 years to be an overnight success”. There have been many failures along the way. The cowboy is integral to the enduring myth of the Wild West and no more so than in Texas, where the great cattle drives were first initiated. No state played a greater role in the trail drive era. West Texas and South Sudan ostensibly don’t have much in common, but from a filming perspective there are some similarities. The land is flat and arid and in both locations the cattle are special. The horns of the cattle looked after by the Dinka in South Sudan are magnificent, but the Texas Longhorn is no poor cousin. With the help of two renowned Texan working cowboys - Craig Carter and Ryon Marshall - we spent last week filming near Valentine, not far from the Mexican border. I knew what I was looking for; a frame with depth; so as in South Sudan, I brought a ladder and a frame with contextuality and breadth; so, I knew that any lens with magnification would be a big error (it normally is anyway when a sense of place is integral to the creative vision). I settled on a standard lens, but we had a problem, the dust being kicked up by the drives was intense. If the wind took the dust towards me, there was not just the inability to film, there was a danger of the thundering herd not seeing me. On one initial drive, they came out of the dust cloud just yards from my ladder. Not something I would recommend. So, we worked out the formula, we would shoot against the light and with the herd directly downwind from me. The cowboys, led by Ryon Marshall, were magnificent and after 72 hours we got the job done. The closing down party in the desert last Thursday night was something I will always remember. Great food, the most engaging of company and, of course, country music. Eagle Eye The spit at Homer, Alaska, has two great attributes. It hosts one of the great dive bars in America - The Salty Dog - and it also offers a chance to get reasonably close to the bald eagles that fish on the shoreline. Their textural beauty always attracts me and the closer one gets, the more one can understand why the expression 'eagle eye' is on the money. They simply don't miss a trick. No Currency Andy Warhol reminded us that “art is whatever you can get away with” and photographers should never be afraid to introduce humour into their work. I do not want to take myself too seriously and if I can use creativity as an antidote to the dangers of working in a literal straight jacket, I most certainly will. The trouble with being led by creative forces is that more often than not, we cannot find the narrative or the idea. It is the equivalent of writer’s block. I can go weeks without an authentic idea that holds promise and feasibility. Ideas don’t tend to come on cue, they often arrive in the middle of the night. This concept excited me from the day it was conceived. The Schmid Ranch, high up in the mountains of Colorado, was Tarantino’s location for The Hateful Eight and when we visited the location in early 2021, I saw the potential of building a set around which to work. The ranch saddles a truly spectacular amphitheatre. In 2021, there is no more contemporary or talked about asset to own than Bitcoin and the majority who own it, hold on to it with great conviction. I sensed that there was room to play a little parody in a wild west setting - Red Dead Redemption was going to tackle cryptocurrency head-on. The final frontier was a tough place where the rule of law was light and valuable possessions would not be lost without an often deadly fight. The lead character in this narrative was clearly not going to give up his asset easily - his loss would be someone else’s gain. I wanted to create a palpable sense of trespass and Ty Mitchell was the perfect character to play the role of the unyielding owner. He plays menace to perfection (though in real life he is a lovely man). Clearly, even in the Rockies in 1880, there were no sellers of Bitcoin. High Noon Mount Moran in the Tetons offers as good a mountain backdrop as I know in America. In the winter, in particular, it has a grandeur that is difficult to match. The lake below this section of the Tetons is frozen thick in midwinter and offers the perfect stage on which to tell stories, but we are always mindful that on a good day, the whole scene become too bright within 45 minutes of sunrise. Images like this require very early starts and we are always in position well before dawn. The Native Americans were introduced to horses by early Spanish immigrants and they adapted quickly to the optionality and mobility given to them by horses. The Comanche in the south became a feared and dominant tribe largely because of their horsemanship skills. This frame - taken on a very cold morning in Wyoming - simply pays homage to a tested partnership that played a material role in shaping 19th century American history. Bonnie and Clyde The old mining village of Creede sits in a tight box canyon 9,000 feet up in the Southern Rockies of Colorado. An imposing vertical cliff face bullies main street and adds to the sense of ‘a town at the end of the line’. Creede plays to the lore and mythology of the wild west and consequently is awash with tourists during the summer. However, in the mid-winter, the place has an abandoned look to it and this was always going to be the best time to film. It would be a bridge too far to try to close the town down in July. We had been throwing around ideas as to where to stage a Bonnie and Clyde story and chose Creede, not just because the high street is little changed from the 1920s, but because the locals, including the sheriff and the council, were fully supportive of our concept.  To a man, the town folk of Creede were committed to helping us bring the project to fruition. For two days, our crew and extras seemingly doubled the winter population of Creede and the one restaurant in town was at capacity most of the time. Fine-tuning the composition was a challenge as ideally, I wanted Bonnie - played by Cara Delevingne - to be as big a part of the image as possible, but I also needed the buildings on both sides of the street to frame the narrative in the middle. Working with wide angle lenses risks making a loose image and I was determined not to fall into that trap. We had not dragged everyone up to this cold final frontier outpost to create a mundane image. My goal was to create one single vignette to emphatically celebrate the heavily mythologised story of Bonnie and Clyde. It therefore had to be rich enough to inform, whilst remaining simple and cinematic.  The final result is a great credit to all involved - Cara, her team, my production team and the many extras. Faye Dunaway played Bonnie in the original film and she was my reference for Cara, who played the role immaculately, as I knew she would. Meanwhile, we will never know whether the driver in the car gave his best Warren Beatty impersonation - perhaps that’s just as well.
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