Buy Art Prints
My Photographs Available To Purchase As Art Prints
If you’d like to buy a large-format art print, please look at my “Art Print Collection“. This is my personal selection of my favourite photographs, selected from many images taken during the past 15 years of exploring Africa’s wild places. The photographs in my art print collection are particularly meaningful to me, as described below. Each image has been edited and adapted for large-format printing. Depending on paper type and size, prices range from about US$700 for an A2 print (60cm x 42cm) to US$3 000 for an A0 print (120cm x 85cm), or larger (I can print up to 2 metres wide). Please contact me on my email scottnramsay@gmail.com for a quote based on your requirements.
How Are The Prints Produced?
My images are printed on Hahnemühle or Felix Schoeller papers. I print using Piezo black and white inks, which allow for greater tonal range in monochromatic prints. I prefer printing in black and white, or desaturated colour, as these have a more enduring impact in large-format art prints. I print each image with a 5 or 10cm white border, and sign each print bottom right in pencil.
How Will The Print Be Delivered?
I will send the print in a strong cardboard roller via a reputable courier company to you. Cost depends on delivery location and time urgency. All deliveries are trackable.
How Long Will The Print Take To Be Delivered?
A total of about two weeks. One week for printing, and one week for delivery via courier, depending on location. Local deliveries in South Africa will take two or three days. International deliveries usually take about five days, but can take up to two weeks depending on customs processing.
What About Framing The Print?
For art prints, I recommend framing the print yourself, with the help of an expert framer in your local area. The type of frame needs to complement the wall and room in which the print will hang. For canvas prints, I recommend block-mounting and stretching the print onto a 30cm or 50cm wooden frame. Please contact me if you need any advice and ideas for framing.
Art Print Collection
This series attempts to portray the potent influence of Africa’s wilderness on my life. These photographs represent what I love most about wild places: those transcendent moments when my own identity is absorbed into my surrounds.
There is a sense of unity, both within myself, and with all of nature. I feel connected to myself, to other human and non-human creatures, the landscape and oceans, and the cosmos. In all these moments, there seems to be a common feeling of individual evaporation, of absolute egoic surrender. Without consciously realising it perhaps, I feel whole. It’s a wonderfully liberating, unifying sensation, which recalibrates my soul.
So often when I’m in African wilderness, I feel like I truly belong – not as Scott Ramsay – but as a human animal, alive on this unutterably beautiful little planet. Nothing else matters but this: I am alive! Yes! The past and future disappear, and I wander effortlessly into a deeply meditative state. My journeys into African wilderness are not only external – they are internal too. I am sure that my time in wilderness has changed me. Obviously journeys like these aren’t always easy, but they are certainly meaningful.
Sometimes I believe that my exposure to wilderness has rewired my brain, or rebooted my soul, or simply returned me to my original natural design. It’s a homecoming of sorts. The more I explore wilderness, the more I want to spend time in these places.
I’ve been fortunate to experience moments that are so deeply meaningful that they defy description with modern language, perhaps because our link to Africa’s wildness – and our own – was formed long before we even discovered the power of speech. We simply don’t have the vocabulary to do justice to this ancient relationship. These images are the best I can do – so far – to express my supreme reverence for African wilderness.
Click to view Numinous collection
In Greek, the word “kairos” means “timeliness” or “the right time”. Almost all my photographs result from being in the right place, at the right time – often not by design, but by chance. Very few of my photographs are extensively planned or choreographed. Perhaps I’d be more “productive” if I was more deliberate in my photographic goals. But I prefer leaving some things to chance, to allow Africa’s endless serendipity (and capriciousness) to influence my work as a photographer – and writer.
I find that if I plan too much, and stick too rigidly to my goals, I lose my peripheral vision, and my situational awareness shrinks. As anyone who has walked in the wild African bush knows, context is all important!
Also, I may be wary of turning Africa’s sacred wilderness and it’s wild animals into yet another commercial commodity. These places are not there just to satisfy some individual’s personal photographic quest. And so I spend several months every year exploring Africa’s wilder places, with one goal: to simply spend as much time as possible in these diverse landscapes and oceans, opening myself up to them as fully as possible.
The more time I spend in wilderness, the more opportunities there are to experience the unknown, the unplanned, the mysterious. This is when I grow and learn – about Africa, and myself, and my relationship to others. And when a photographic opportunity arises, it’s often not because I planned it, but because I just happened to be there, on this magnficent landscape of Africa, in the presence of it’s incomparable wild animals.
I think there is a beautiful poetry to this photographic method, an acknowledgement that I am a tiny part of an infinite network of life on Earth, over which I have very little control. Spending time in wilderness is the foundation of my existence. Wild nature saved me, it gave me life, and it remains my greatest inspiration – and challenge. Photography is what I do, but I live for wilderness.
Click to view Kairos collection
This series features photographs of Africa’s landscapes and oceans, and in all of them, I attempt to portray the “spirit of place” – or genius loci. I have chosen images for this series that depict the continent’s immense size and incomparable atmosphere. In all of them, scale is a prominent feature: Africa is obviously huge, and the land and sky dwarfs everything that lives on it’s surfaces and in it’s oceans’ depths. Even baobab trees, elephants and whales seem tiny!
This is one of the reasons why I love spending time in African wilderness: confronted by the tremendous size and scope of the land, I feel small and insignificant. But this is a good thing, because this brings humility, perspective and purpose.
After sleeping under the stars in the Namib desert, or making eye contact with a lowland silverback, it’s impossible to not ask yourself some profound questions: What does my life mean? What is truly important? What actually matters? In a universe of a billion galaxies, that is 15 billion years old, we live on a tiny planet bursting with life.
Each of us may live for 70 years, if we’re lucky – just a blink of an eye in cosmic time, a flash of a spark in the infinite darkness. Then we’re gone. As poet Mary Oliver asks, “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” African wilderness continually confronts me with this question. What will I reply?
Click to view Motherland collection
These images showcase just a few of my photographs of people that I’ve come across while on my travels in or near African wilderness areas. I am fascinated by the human species, and how Africa gave birth to all of humanity. This continent forged the human body, mind and consciousness.
When I photograph African people who still live in a largely traditional way, subsisting off the land and it’s animals, I’m conscious that every single person is uniquely African, even if they are superficially part of a different clan or tribe.
As the famous zoologist Jonathan Kingdon wrote: “It is a dawning realisation that the mysteries of human existence are rooted here, in Africa. To know yourself, you must get to know Africa.”
Every time I encounter someone here in Africa (or anywhere else!), no matter how different they may seem, I’m reminded of our common ancestry, of how everyone on Earth today once had ancestors in Africa. And so in some ways, no matter where you live, no matter your skin colour, no matter your language, you are also African!