Capturing/Captioning Wildlife in Nature Photography

The Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition is a prestigious international contest whose aim is to provide a showcase for the world’s best nature photography. Though essentially books of pictures, the Wildlife Photographer of the Year portfolios have always devoted great attention to the written texts. The study focuses on the captions that accompany the hundred pictures in the 26th edition of the Portfolio, which contains the photos selected in the 2016 competition and exhibited at the Natural History Museum in London from 21 October 2016 to 10 September 2017. These captions are an interesting object from a linguistic, and more specifically ecolinguistic, perspective. While witnessing how they differ from those in other prestigious books of nature photography, the analysis intends to highlight linguistic features, narrative patterns and rhetorical devices while connecting them to more specific issues of environmental discourse within an ecosophical framework.