Beauty rich with unease in Wildlife photos

Time for the annual exhibition of escapist imagery, which leads us into remote places to gasp at Cartier-Bresson-like "frozen moments", and to see the magic on our own doorstep. As environments melt and burn, and their inhabitants come under threat, these photographs are reminders of the riches in peril, but also of those carrying on as usual.

The year’s overall winner, National Geographic legend Steve Winter, also received the Gerald Durrell Award for Endangered Wildlife, for his Snowstorm leopard in Northern India. This rarely seen creature walks on snowy earth across the frame, in darkness, captured by one of 14 remote-controlled cameras set up by Winter awaiting the animal’s arrival before he went to sleep.

Moral questions increasingly enter this competition and cuddly images are clearly weeded out. Dave Maitland’s One Earth Award-winning "Sacrifice", a sickening image of a colobus monkey’s head in a bonfire, highlights the bushmeat trade but raises many questions. Savagery abounds in nature — and is part of the fascination here in amusing images of a chimp scoffing half a pig, and a tree frog trying to eat a snake. It’s fun to anthropomorphise Stefano Unterthiner’s black-crested macaque monkey, "Troublemaker," a hoodie with a hairdo like Nigel Kennedy.

Suggestions of fine art enter in many guises, but Carlos Virgilis’s "Sun Jelly" (winner of the Black and White Award) converts a suspended jellyfish into a translucent abstraction resembling a detailed charcoal drawing.

Each year, the under-17s bring many breathtakingly beautiful images, and Catriona Parfitt (UK), who won the ­junior competition with "The Show", is exceptional. Such young contenders are the future caretakers of these subjects, and, as Winter said of the snow leopards, "I hope we can give them a bright future".
Until 26 April 2009. (020 7942 5000, www.nhm.ac.uk)

Wildlife Photographer Of The Year
Natural History Museum
Cromwell Road, SW7 5BD