Wild Eye: an interview with Beverly and Dereck Joubert
For over four decades, Dereck and Beverly Joubert have stood at the intersection of art and activism, capturing the raw beauty of Africa’s wilderness while fiercely advocating for its preservation. Their new book, Wild Eye, is more than a retrospective — it is a “visual memoir” and a call to action, shaped by five deeply personal themes: Awe, Compassion, Humility, Intimacy, and Legacy.
Spanning nearly 400 pages, Wild Eye: A Life in Photographs distills thousands of quiet, powerful moments into a compelling visual narrative that reveals the soul of wild Africa — and the urgency of saving it. From the early, exuberant chaos of their work to the intimate portrayals of animals like Legadema, the leopard who changed their lives, the Jouberts share not only their breathtaking imagery but the evolution of their own purpose. With Dereck’s reflective prose and Beverly’s patient lens, this memoir captures a duality: reverence for the fleeting stillness in nature and the burning need to protect it before it disappears.
At its core, Wild Eye: A Life in Photographs is a statement of empathy — toward animals, people, and the planet. It challenges the idea that wildlife photography is passive or apolitical. Instead, the Jouberts argue that beauty is the entry point to awareness, and awareness the catalyst for action. As they’ve come to learn through years of living in remote, fragile ecosystems: “We are not apart from Nature… we are Nature.”
In a time of ecological crisis, Wild Eye invites us to pause, to see, and ultimately, to feel enough to fight for what remains wild.
The book is described as a “visual memoir” and divided into five acts: Awe, Compassion, Humility, Intimacy, and Legacy. How did you arrive at these specific themes, and why do they feel essential to telling your story?
These themes are not recently arrived at but an expression of the way we have categorized the phases of our lives, often at the time, with debate, where we say: “We have to move on to the next level now…” and as we look back at our film work and even style we can see the tipping points and different styles. When we started our style was kind of wild, all over the place because it was all, “Wow, look at this,” then we started becoming more in tune and went down lower to their eye level for example, and tried harder to be in their world, not just see it from ours, or from our eye level. Each one has been a different emotional inner truth we have found or tested for ourselves.
With more than 400 pages, Wild Eye is a sweeping retrospective of your work. How did you begin the process of curating which images and stories would best define your 40-year journey?
Well, there needed to be a balance of old and new for a start because the work is definitely better later, but the early work also captured things that we just don’t see anymore. So, the selection was firstly about whether Beverly was proud of an image (especially the older images) and why, and then the rarity value for it to qualify. This is forty years of work, where on average Beverly is capturing thousands of images a day (once she moved to digital) so the selection process was brutal.
Beverly, your photography is known for capturing emotionally charged, often quiet moments in the wild. Thank you. How do you develop the patience and sensitivity to witness — and not disturb — such intimate scenes?
I do go into a kind of Zen release to the moment, once we are in position, waiting, eye at the camera for that moment. We spend time at a waterhole in Kenya and it will be for days at a time, virtually without moving a muscle until it cramps. I often wonder if its enthusiasm to capture it, or fear of losing the moment if I relax! I think you only call it patience if you are doing something you don’t really like doing, otherwise it’s just a pleasure and engaging when time slides by quickly. (I have to practice more patience in social events or meetings.)
Dereck, your reflections add narrative depth to Beverly’s photographs. How did writing for this book differ from scripting a documentary or field journal?
I approached this with some similarities but many differences, where writing a script is all after the assembly of images. Here we were trying to organize the structure and it could have taken a dozen different paths, (dusk to dawn and back, chronologically in years, locations…) so I needed to write from the heart about those tipping points in our lives, those ‘chapters’ as a test to see if the imagery could fall into each of those slightly more intellectually. Once we had the broad categories we mined Beverly’s selections to see if they matched the journey we’d been though, and while there was still quite a back and forth, we had our ‘chapters.’ All I had to do then was flesh it out, and then condense, a process I always go through, (planning, over writing and condensing) to get to a sense of what those meant to us. Were there moments you found unexpectedly emotional to revisit? It is interesting because in parallel we are writing our life’s memoir and this feels like a visual journey of that, so each image evoked memories of what was going on in our lives then, so when I flipped over to the memoir, I had a visual cue, and certainly some of those stimulated great recall of happy times and traumatic times. But that combination is really the roadmap of all our lives isn’t it?
Some of your most powerful images involve tension, silence, and vulnerability rather than action. What compels you to focus on these subtle, often overlooked moments in nature?
I do like the peaceful moments, and while they are often seen as the calm before the storms of action, they are actually the other way around because action happens quite rarely, even though everyone chases it. Most of the time nothing happens! And yet ‘nothing’ is often visually stimulating and a greater challenge to make interesting. I am always on the lookout for these moments of calm, and I treat them with the same importance as a lion kill or cheetah running. What is in the frame is different but instead of ‘taking’ an image of action, I find I am ‘making’ these with greater care and craftmanship.
In the “Intimacy” section, you share images that took years of trust and observation to capture. Can you recall a particular image in the book that embodies this long-term relationship with a subject?
Clearly the relationship we developed with a leopard we called Legadema led us deeper into this realm of intimacy with nature and with any animal than ever before. We found her when she was eight days old and stayed with her for another four years or more. We were watching her sleep for hours at a time, day in and day out, and we counted her spots, and agonized with her when her mother finally expelled her. Each time though, she had us, watching nearby, so she often turned to us for comfort and intimacy, at some point curling up inside our car. We never touched her but we gave her free reign to do what she wanted to do around us.
Both of you have worked in some of Africa’s most remote and ecologically diverse regions. Over the decades, what have been the most profound changes you’ve observed in the landscapes or animal behaviors?
In some cases we have lost numbers of animals. When we were born there were 450,000 lions, and today there may be 20,000 and that 95% decline is consistent across all big cats and elephants and forests, basically everything that makes up the planet’s biodiversity. Today that mammal life on the planet is made up 36% by humans, 60% by our livestock and that leaves wildlife at 4%. We need more people to travel journeys like ours starting with Awe and leading to understand what we want our legacy, as humans to be.
Your projects, like Rhinos Without Borders and the Big Cats Initiative, show deep engagement with both wildlife and local communities. How does Wild Eye reflect the interconnectedness of human and ecological survival?
I hope, we hope that it talks to the moment, now, when collaboration between private sector, commerce, conservation, communities and governments to get the right thing done is vital and our small efforts, highlighted in this book, might just be examples of what we could be doing on global citizen level scale. Let’s face it, hunting is not conservation. Selling baby elephants is not conservation, expelling communities from their land is not in the best interests of the world. Working together is.
Legacy, as you present it, isn’t just about personal impact — it’s about empowering others. Can you speak to the emerging generation of African conservationists featured in the book, and why their role is so pivotal?
We were just at a conference about human wildlife coexistence where most of the room was filled with local community leaders, local conservationists from those communities and scientists often from those same regions, all seeking best practices and information on what works for human wildlife coexistence as opposed to conflict. We have a lot of work to do, but I do believe that despite massive human population increases we can find working solutions to this, but we won’t achieve it by dumping western world values on Africa. I remember our friend, the former president of Botswana, Ian Khama, speaking eloquently about how African problems need African solutions.
You describe Wild Eye as more than a book — it’s a call to action. What kind of reader response do you hope for, beyond admiration of the imagery?
Firstly, we are calling for a change in our ‘contract with Nature,’ a new benign relationship where we find solutions and stop the madness of extraction, harvesting, killing for sport, fun, or commercial ‘greed.’ This is not a vegetable garden we can prune or harvest, its sustainability is not in our use of it. Every time we do this, every activity we deploy to use ‘just a little,’ turns into ‘a lot.’ It is obvious but still being debated maddingly, for example that where lions are hunted that there are fewer of them. The same is true for every species. If you shoot them, they disappear! And yet hunting for selfish reasons, (a trophy on a wall) often masquerades as conservation and like the naked emperor the illusion doesn’t hold up under scientific scrutiny – but we continue to condone it or give the argument for its space at the table. All we are asking for really, is that people question whatever they hear and apply logic and science. Secondly, I believe that there is a big difference between saying something and saying nothing, when you have the facts. Saying nothing makes us all complicit in a crime against nature.
What would you say to someone who sees wildlife photography as passive or aesthetic, rather than political or urgent?
Well it can be. It often is. Millions of digital images are taken daily, of lions or pretty landscapes or birds, with no agenda at all, and so it should be. Beauty is to celebrated. Sometimes we need to appreciate that beauty before we can feel anything, and once we feel something and we know it may be taken away or lost, then we might be moved to act. Action is advocacy and to get policy change is political. But it started with feeling something. We followed a journey, where our first work was about beauty (awe) and onwards to where we are today. But we needed to go through that, for ourselves and for our credibility to now be able to speak out.
You’ve often spoken about storytelling as a tool for change. In a time of climate crisis and biodiversity loss, what stories still need to be told — and who needs to hear them?
Everyone needs to hear these urgent stories. The stories that most need to be told in my opinion, are those about loss, but also hope. We can fix things and there are many examples of solutions. Moving rhinos is one, our rewilding efforts, moving elephants and other endangered species is another. The massive advances in sustainable energy use around the world is another, and it shouldn’t be overlooked or overshadowed by the negativity. Humans are very inventive and very proactive when the direction of good is set. That pathway needs navigation and leadership, so that story should also be told. The often-expressed sentiment that we don’t need any more heroes is not what I believe. We do need heroes, maybe not the usual archetypes but there are plenty of heroes doing amazing selfless work, and they have stories that inspire.
Looking back across 40 years, is there a single moment — captured or uncaptured — that you feel defines your life’s work?
Perhaps it is all in an image. The cover image of Wild Eye. It was chosen carefully for many reasons, looking into the eyes transports us to the soul of an animal hopefully touching all to want to protect them, these could be eyes of extinction. But going beyond the obvious eye association. This is the face of Legadema who we came to know so well for years, but she changed our lives, and set us on a new course, one that saw us create the Big Cats Initiative and save thousands of lions and leopards. Her wild eye, gave us a perspective on how valuable being wild is, to them, to us, to all of us. Wildness is often seen as a negative, as in ‘unruly’ as in damned naughty children, but in them it is often not discipline they need to tame that wildness but direction for them to best use it that they need from us.
How has living in constant proximity to nature shaped your understanding of emotion — not just in animals, but in yourselves?
Nature embodies everything on the planet. Emotion, our actions, the wind, the sky, lions hunting elephants, everything. Knowing that has given us a greater tolerance of everything on the planet, even human behavior and emotions. We are not apart from Nature, or it below or better than us. We are Nature. That doesn’t mean we should tolerate aberrant human cruelness and badness, but it has afforded us both the ability to understand it at least. Understanding something is the first step is developing a strategy to combat it, adjust it, work with it, and hopefully find a solution that doesn’t destroy the very thing we are a part of. Nature.
About Dereck & Beverly Joubert, Co-Founders of Great Plains Conservation
Together, Dereck and Beverly Joubert have created, designed and operated fifteen stunning owned, and partner safari properties in Kenya, Botswana and Zimbabwe and the company’s charity, The Great Plains Foundation, which strives to preserve and protect landscapes, wildlife, and the communities who rely on them in Africa. See here for a clip on the couple. With more than 40 produced films, 12 published books and many scientific papers, they are also the founders of the Big Cats Initiative, Project Ranger and their charity Great Plains Foundation.
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