Austin Stevens

Austin Stevens was born on 19 May 1950 in Pretoria, then in the Transvaal province and now in Gauteng, South Africa. He made his name with reptiles rather than with the gallery world, and his photography has always served his expeditions: the picture of a particular snake in its habitat is usually the point of the trip.

From snake parks to a record

He worked with snakes in South African snake parks, including the Transvaal Snake Park and the Hartbeespoort Dam Snake and Animal Park, and is described as a herpetologist. He became widely known for a Guinness record attempt in which he lived in a glass enclosure with 36 venomous snakes. Most sources give the length as 107 days and nights, though one listing says 170, so the number is worth checking before it is repeated.

Television and books

Austin Stevens: Snakemaster, broadcast on Animal Planet from 2004 to 2009, made him internationally known. The programmes follow him to remote places to find and film dangerous animals, and he turned the same journeys into books, among them Snakemaster: Wildlife Adventures with the World's Most Dangerous Reptiles. After marrying in 2007 he moved to Australia, where he lives in Queensland.

How to look

Stevens belongs to the wildlife side of African photography, where the working tools are patience, field craft and distance. When you look at his pictures, treat them as documents of an encounter: ask how close the photographer was, what the animal was doing, and whether the frame shows the habitat or only the animal. The aim is closer to a naturalist's field record than to a portrait, and the television series, the books and the photographs all come from the same journeys. That is a different tradition from the documentary work in our list of South African photographers. See also African photographers.