Many wild places exist for fortuitous reasons such as a locations remoteness agriculture failing to gain a foothold due to topography or a governments decision that a place has an inherent value for commercial reasons. So-called ‘wild’ animals that inhabit these places are perceived to be free of human intervention. I have visited National Parks around the world in search of viewing wildlife; India to photograph tigers, Africa for lions, cheetahs and elephants and the top end of Australia to photograph crocodiles and birdlife. I feel invigorated viewing wild animals.

There is however one wildlife encounter I don’t photograph. The animal that has been tagged for identification purposes or radio collared for tracking. When I see these tagged animals I put my camera down. The wild encounter is ruined.

In this body of work I explore these ideas by using post-production techniques to digitally add tags, collars and monitoring antennae to animals I have photographed in the wild. This re-contextualises the wild animal into one that has had contact with humans. Adding to this dislocation from the wild the animals are metaphorically removed from their environment and placed in bright colourful spaces. The images are aesthetically driven bythe shapes of the animals photographed whilst the post-production tagging questions the animals place in the world. By ‘tagging’ the animal there is a fundamental shift in how the animal is viewed and more importantly judged.