Peter and Beverly Pickford are passionate about wilderness. More than thirty-five years ago, they stepped out of the security of their professions and began their first book on the wilderness areas of northeastern South Africa. Their career as professional wildlife photographers and authors has since carried them across all of the earth’s continents to produce nine award-winning books.

Peter and Beverly’s latest work, Wild Land, has taken six years to produce. Their unrelenting determination to see such an immense project through has been driven by a belief in the power of photography and the written word. A photograph and its related story has the capacity to reach hundreds of thousands of people: in the intimacy of their home, in their work place or in their quite moments. And it can influence the paradigm of their thinking. It is this belief – coupled with the conviction that real wilderness protection lies not in laws and official jurisdictions, but in the hearts of a nation’s people – that urged Peter and Beverly on their journey to bring what wild land remains to the notice of the world.

For Wild Land, Peter and Beverly have broken out of the mould of traditional wildlife photography to create a unique photographic style. They stepped back from their subject, and, instead, made images of the vast scope of the wilderness, emphasising wild animals’ dependence on their environment. The resulting four-hundred-page epic is a tribute to the power of innovative photographic imagery. Wild Land aches with what words struggle to describe: the resonance of wilderness in our inner being, the power of land to transform our emotion, and our ability to transcend the immediate and become sublime.

To hold the book, is to journey, not only to the physical places that Peter and Beverly found in their exploration of the extremes of the earth, but also to experience humility and awe in places so wild they induce fear. It is to know what J. W. N. Sullivan meant when he wrote:

 At such moments one suddenly sees everything with new eyes; one feels on the brink of some great revelation. It is as if we caught a glimpse of some incredibly beautiful world that lies silently about us all the time.