{"id":470644,"date":"2026-03-12T01:50:28","date_gmt":"2026-03-12T01:50:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/470644\/"},"modified":"2026-03-12T01:50:28","modified_gmt":"2026-03-12T01:50:28","slug":"i-used-a-dead-fox-from-my-freezer-for-a-photo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/470644\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I used a dead fox from my freezer for a photo\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chris Packham has never lacked courage, but the potentially dangerous creatures he has made a career of taking on have generally been human ones: irate gamekeepers he calls out for killing his beloved birds of prey; fox hunters flouting the law; field sports enthusiasts who recognise, rightly, that here is their No 1 adversary, and who I\u2019ve heard spit out the very word \u201cPackham\u201d as an expletive.<\/p>\n

So forthright has the broadcaster been in the cause of conservation that he has regularly received death threats and endured vandalism at his home in the New Forest. His new exhibition of his wildlife photography, however, showcases the risks he is willing to face from some of the world\u2019s other fearsome beasts, such as lions and buffaloes, on their own turf in Africa. Closer to home, his work brings out the singular personality of the 64-year-old, who has spoken frequently of his autism, which is characterised by obsession and control. More of that later.<\/p>\n

The first picture you now see on entering Piccadilly\u2019s Iconic Images Gallery, better known for the celebrity shots of Terry O\u2019Neill and Eve Arnold, is of the head of an African buffalo, its horns ridged and rutted as if carved from prehistoric wood, its ancient eyes staring imperiously into Packham\u2019s lens in Kicheche in the Masai Mara, Kenya. Such animals, weighing up to 2,000lb and fast over a short distance, are known to be aggressive. There\u2019s a debate over whether they outrank the hippopotamus as the continent\u2019s most prolific killer of people. This fella certainly doesn\u2019t look especially thrilled by what he\u2019s seeing.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Having originally trained as a TV wildlife cameraman, Packham clearly knows exactly what he\u2019s doing. That said, he isn\u2019t bothered about realism, or zoological exactitude, or disinterestedly documenting nature. \u201cI haven\u2019t got time for that,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019ve no interest in roaming around on safari for two weeks to see what I could get. It never works as a composition. You always get a stray antler, or a tail coming out of a nose.\u201d<\/p>\n

The way he works is to first imagine the picture he wants to create, sometimes years before he captures it, then create a piece of art, polished and fully controlled by him, out of the inhabitants of the natural world. He is happy to use a bit of trickery to lure his subjects towards his lens, then rely on technical manipulation afterwards to achieve his desired effect.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Chris Packham: \u2018My dogs saved my life. I want to be buried with them\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n

But for all the post-production ingenuity available, you still first have to be there, get up close and personal, hold your nerve and press the shutter.<\/p>\n

How far away was it, I ask. \u201cOh, from here to about there,\u201d he says, indicating a classic Freddie Mercury portrait 20ft away. \u201cThey won\u2019t charge a vehicle unless they get spooked. This one was just curious. If they do charge I\u2019m told the best thing, if you can\u2019t get up a tree, is to lie on the ground. You might get stomped but if you run, it\u2019ll catch you.\u201d<\/p>\n

We move on to an image of four elephants \u2014 bull, cow and two calves \u2014 taken at sunset at their watering hole in Botswana. Packham spent an hour or more lying in shallow water, seeking the perfect reflection in its surface, to nail this shot. Again, he had it all planned out. \u201cI spend hours looking through thousands of pictures of elephants online because I\u2019m not interested in taking somebody else\u2019s photo,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\"Elephant<\/p>\n

Rorschach Family<\/p>\n

CHRIS PACKHAM<\/p>\n

Elephants are dangerous and, as Brooklyn Beckham infamously noted, so hard to photograph. How far away was this little (but very big) family? This time he uses Jimi Hendrix as a measure. Hendrix too is about 20ft away.<\/p>\n

We pass by a shot of a squirrel in the snow, pausing only to snigger at Packham\u2019s title: Frozen Nuts. Don\u2019t think I didn\u2019t appreciate that, Chris, I tell him. \u201cCheers, mate,\u201d he replies.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Moving on, we arrive at a lion that, like the buffalo, is staring balefully into the camera.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d been charged by lions repeatedly in South Africa,\u201d he confides, \u201cso I said to Charlotte, \u2018I want to photograph a charging lion.\u2019\u201d Charlotte is Charlotte Corney, Packham\u2019s partner, a zookeeper on the Isle of Wight. They\u2019ve been together many years but live separately. Packham has been a loner since boyhood, generally preferring his own company and the natural world to the human, cultivating his various obsessions: photography, punk rock, cinema, sculpture, design. And, I think, fashion. Today he is as meticulously co-ordinated as ever in bright, smart-casual gear.<\/p>\n

\u201cLions don\u2019t usually charge you, they\u2019re scared of you, but we found this huge enclosure in southern Namibia where they had lions that had killed people,\u201d he says. \u201cThey said, \u2018Yeah, they\u2019ll charge, but only once or twice. Once they haven\u2019t killed you, they get frustrated.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cSo you go into the compound, and I\u2019ve got to kneel down, which is bonkers, but I want to get eye level. The lions come out, and they charge straight away, bombing at you quite fast. Then they stop just about there.\u201d (Mick Jagger, 5ft away.)<\/p>\n

Eh? And you stay put? Aren\u2019t you just, er, crapping yourself? \u201cNo, not really. If you don\u2019t run, the chances of them doing anything are really slim.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

But every instinct in your body is saying run, right? \u201cWell, no, I\u2019m thinking about taking the photo. And then they go really frothy. And then they go and sit down and just look at you like that.\u201d This, he says, is an instinctive thing. \u201cBasically, their prey runs. So if you\u2019re not running you might be a problem for them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Away from this side project Packham has been as busy as ever, presenting Springwatch and its spin-offs, producing books, campaigning relentlessly on behalf of myriad conservation groups, travelling the world for business and pleasure. \u201cI\u2019ve also just made a film about parakeets in England,\u201d he says. He was delighted with the recent Green by-election victory. \u201cZack [Polanski] and I have been communicating.\u201d He\u2019s also close to Ed Miliband, the government\u2019s chief net zero advocate. \u201cAnything that\u2019s not Reform, I\u2019m happy with. [Richard] Tice has already said, \u2018If you\u2019re in renewables, we\u2019re coming for you.\u2019 I mean, look at what\u2019s happened in America. All the environmental stuff, it\u2019s just gone. The fabric\u2019s gone. The scientists are gone. The research stations are shut down. The satellites have been pulled offline. And they\u2019d do the same here.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 Chris Packham joins protest over Sea Life penguins \u2018kept in the dark\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n

Back in Piccadilly, moving closer to home, I admire a delightful shot (cute, bit cheesy but who cares?) of a fox curled up in the snow, its snout buried in its curled tail. Foxes are Packham\u2019s favourite mammal. He photographed this one in his back garden in 2010 \u201cwhen we still got snow\u201d and it is the oldest picture in the exhibition. \u201cBeautiful, aren\u2019t they? It\u2019s got all that soft light bouncing back off. It\u2019s picking up all the details. Snow\u2019s great to photograph in.\u201d That remark is a reminder that Packham is more than an enthusiastic amateur. As a young man, working with his sister Jenny, now a celebrated fashion designer, he had pictures published in Vogue.<\/p>\n

Taking a short avian detour, we see pictures of a swan, an arctic tern and an owl. He has titled these images with names of screen icons: Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Bette Davis. They speak to the title of the exhibition: More Beautiful Than You.<\/p>\n

\"A\"Black\"Black<\/p>\n

Audrey Hepburn<\/p>\n

CHRIS PACKHAM<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m saying, this is Grace Kelly, this is Audrey Hepburn,<\/a> they\u2019re sensational, but are they more beautiful than the swan? The tern?\u201d We then take in pictures of the actual Hepburn, the Norman Parkinson portrait, plus one of Faye Dunaway, plus O\u2019Neill\u2019s apparently still scandalous shot of a crucified Raquel Welch in her One Million Years BC fur bikini. \u201cThey had to take that out of the window display because people complained,\u201d Packham says.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s possible there may also be mutterings about On the Earthy Bed Beneath the Beech, which depicts another fox curled, apparently asleep, between the roots of a tree. The animal is, in fact, dead. Packham had collected its body as roadkill near his home and kept it in one of his many freezers for years, along with various other cadavers. \u201cWoodpeckers, herons, storks, a badger, Charlotte\u2019s rabbits,\u201d he says. \u201cI thought I should let it be scavenged, part of the natural cycle, but it was so beautiful, so valuable. I couldn\u2019t let it go.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

On the Earthy Bed Beneath the Beech<\/p>\n

CHRIS PACKHAM<\/p>\n

Packham painstakingly created the tableau, meticulously tidying the ground at the base of the tree, waiting for ivy to flower to add colour, making sure the weather was just right, lighting the scene to give a \u201cheavenly, fairytale, magical perspective\u201d, then pegging the long-dead fox out in a sleeping posture. \u201cIt\u2019s about control. The fox wasn\u2019t going anywhere. A live wild fox would have run off.\u201d <\/p>\n

Some people, I say, will think this is all a bit weird. \u201cI\u2019m not trying to be weird,\u201d Packham says mildly, utterly unfazed as ever. \u201cI\u2019m trying to, you know, preserve it. Honour it. Venerate it.\u201d The corpse, he says, was relatively intact. \u201cIf they\u2019re smashed up I just cut their heads off and keep the skulls.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yep, there\u2019s no doubt he\u2019s a strange one, Chris Packham. A one-off, a driven, wildly emotional yet cautiously fastidious man. But I like and admire his refusal to compromise. As David Attenborough passes the baton, Packham is the foremost British champion of the myriad other creatures with whom we share the planet. <\/p>\n

\u201cThis gallery,\u201d he says, \u201cis dedicated to this whole icon thing, how we revere certain people, put them on a pedestal, worship them, sometimes for the way they look, sometimes for what they do, sometimes for what they represent. And I thought, \u2018Right, for me, these are the real icons, powerful, godlike.\u2019 You see that picture and you think that fox is alive and so it lives on, in a way. I\u2019ve given it some sort of life.\u201d<\/p>\n

More Beautiful Than You: The Wildlife Photography of Chris Packham will be open to the public to April 11 at the Iconic Images Gallery, London. Admission is free. iconicimagesgallery.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Chris Packham has never lacked courage, but the potentially dangerous creatures he has made a career of taking…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":470645,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":["post-470644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=470644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470644\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/470645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=470644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=470644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=470644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}