The Bwindi Impenetrable Forest is exactly as it sounds. Located in the south-western edge of Uganda, along the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Impenetrable Forest is a densely packed old-growth forest with over 100 species of trees and shrubs. It is home to countless animals, most notably that of the silverback gorilla.
The treeline is so thick it blocks most sunlight from reaching the forest floor, making conditions on ground-level, even the middle of the day, incredibly dark. It was in the darkness that Jacquie Matechuk had stopped in the shrubbery to watch a mother gorilla and two of her babies lounging in the clearing ahead of her.
Lost in the magic of the moment, Matechuk heard rustling in the foliage beside her. She reached back to check with a park ranger, her guide for the day, who nodded to signify there was nothing to worry about.
Then came more crackling. To Matechuk’s left came movement in the treeline, the face of a male silverback gorilla pushed through a thicket of branches and focused its stare on Matechuk and her guide. Matechuk held up her camera and snapped a picture.
The gorilla then stood up and checked on its family still in the clearing. He pushed through the trees, brushing Matechuk’s shoulder as he did so, and joined the rest of his family. Matechuk couldn’t believe it, “it was an incredible moment, it felt very personal and very powerful,” she would say later.
The photograph, converted to black and white, would win Matechuk a reFocus Black and White photography award for wildlife photography. She called it, ‘The Watchman.’
Matechuk says that she’s relatively new to wildlife photography. Since the 1990’s she had been an extreme sports photographer, documenting feats of unbelievable and dangerous athletic talent. But, in 2020 the pandemic shut down all sports and her work contracts dried up. She needed a new medium, or a new line of work.
To keep her skills sharp she joined a photography club with a wildlife photographer and a landscape photographer. As the group hung out, Matechul fell in love with the natural world and realized that the challenges and characteristics of wildlife photographer were very similar to that of extreme sports.
“[Moving] from photographing wildlife to photographing extreme sports, it felt like a very natural progression to move from one to the other,” Matechuk said. “It’s about beautiful chaos, there is zero script to what is going to unfold.”
Photographers of both wildlife subjects and extreme sports go into a situation knowledgeable about their subjects, about the sport or about the section of wildlife that they enter into, Matechuk said. Photographers can’t know what they’re subjects are going to do next, all they can do is prepare their equipment and use their skills to capture as many moments as they can. But then the action happens.
“There is zero warning for things that unfold or what you're going to find,” Matechuk said. “You've just got to find ways to make the absolute best capture that you can under all those different circumstances.”
Matechuk is a Canon Ambassador and has travelled the world to photograph and document wildlife in its natural environment. She’s been to remote places in Africa and Antarctica, and highlights India as a personal favourite of the many trips she’s gone on.
She says photography is extremely rehabilitative and compares it to a vice that one uses to cope with the stress and demands of day-to-day life.
“Just everything disappears,” she said. “There is not anything outside of where my lens is pointing that's weighing on my heart or in my mind at that moment…it is extremely freeing and I think it grounds us and connects us back to these primal emotions and feelings that we have, without all the distraction of technology.”
Through her work, Matechuk has been able to team up with organizations to advance environmental conservation efforts. Around the time she spoke with the Cochrane Eagle, she was returning from a week-long trip in the Khutzeymateen in northern B.C. where she was working on producing video content for a conservation group.
She says the work she’s done for environmental conservation has been incredibly rewarding.
“Nothing is more rewarding than seeing your images or your videos being used as assets going to companies in order to fight to advocate for change or conservation to move policy and people to support the greater cause,” Matechuk said.
Viewers of finished photography see a final product as art, as if the photograph is painted exactly as the photographer imagined the subject in their heads. But the amount of trial and error is staggering. Thousands of shots are taken to get the one image that will work.
“I swear, I have failed more than anyone I know,” said Matechuk. “And that's just part of the process. Every time you're swinging and missing, you're learning something about your swing, about the game, about the ball, about everything. And that's the same with photography.”
There is a distinct style to the photographs that Matechuk has taken-- or at least for the ones she has won awards for. Her photographs are in black and white, devoid of the extra, and perhaps unnecessary, colour that can block out the subject from the viewer's attention.
Matechuk, however, said she doesn’t take and compose her photographs with a distinctive style in mind. In the end, her photographs look the same way she felt when she took them, and that is the stylistic choice she makes in the edit room.
In ‘The Watchman’, the award-winning photo of the silverback in the Impenetrable Forest, Matechuk describes why she coloured it the way she did.
“I know how I felt and I know what I saw, how I felt when I saw it, and unfortunately in the colour version there's just so much distraction with all the green and the different shades of green around the gorilla, it just didn't have the same feel.
“When I saw the image I had flipped it to a black and white and reduced a lot of those greens, which made my subject stand out all of a sudden and that's how it felt when I was there,” she said. “It's like nothing existed except these peering eyes coming through.”
Perhaps it’s not a reason for a style choice one can find in a textbook, but the multi-award winning Matechuk is confident in what she does.
“It seems to be working,” she said.
