South African Coasts – Sylvia Earle (contributor) et al
South African Coasts is an initiative of Sustainable Seas Trust, one of my favourite local non profit conservation organisations. You can read about their mission on their website, but in brief, they aim to care for the marine environment by caring for the people that depend on it. In South Africa, this is an eminently sensible approach, given the degree of inequality and disadvantage that is characteristic of many coastal communities.
Over a period of months, a photography competition was held with categories for everyone from happy snappers like me to professionals like Rob Tarr (whose amazing work features prominently in the book). Photographs had to be taken on the coast, or underwater. The best photographs, as judged by a panel of eminent South African judges including Fiona Ayerst and Peter Chadwick, were selected to appear in this book.
The result is a beautiful, remarkably high quality (given that people like me were allowed to submit pictures for consideration!) volume that can be read as a love letter from the people of South Africa to our 3,000 kilometre coastline. The book is organised thematically, with short essays by South African conservationists and adventurers at the start of each section. The foreword was written by Sylvia Earle, and the book publicises the establishment of the first few Hope Spots along the South African coast.
One of my favourite aspects of the book is the pages which feature twenty or more pictures of waves, or sunrises, or sunsets, arranged in a grid. Each photographer is credited for their work, and the location at which the image was captured is recorded. This is a beautiful souvenir volume for all the contributors, a great gift for ocean-loving visitors to our country, and – for me – a compendium of ideas for new places on our coast that I have yet to visit.
You can get a copy of the book here.
