Vernon Chalmers’ work demonstrates how colour can be enlisted as a philosophical tool: to slow perception, to register affect without melodrama, and to mediate ethical relations between humans and the nonhuman.
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| Pensive Common Waxbill : Along the Diep River, Woodbridge Island |
"Vernon Chalmers occupies a distinctive position in contemporary South African photography, operating at the intersection of natural-history documentation, pedagogical practice, and a reflective, phenomenological approach to seeing. While widely known within Cape Town’s photography and birding communities for his birds-in-flight work and Canon camera training, Chalmers’ ongoing engagement with colour, light, and solitude positions him as a practitioner whose images function as existential meditations: photographs that do not merely record but interrogate the conditions of perception, presence, and human nonhuman relation (Chalmers, 2023/2025). This essay situates Chalmers within a lineage of colour photographers whose formal choices - palette, exposure, and compositional restraint - are inseparable from philosophical concerns about being and meaning. Drawing on Chalmers’ published statements, portfolio work, and public profile, the essay develops three claims: (1) Chalmers deliberately uses colour as a primary existential signifier rather than a decorative afterthought; (2) his photographic practice is informed by pedagogical and phenomenological commitments that emphasize attention, presence, and slow looking; and (3) his work contributes to a localized, ecologically aware variant of existential photography that is both intimate and public-facing. Support for these claims is found in Chalmers' website, social media, and professional descriptions. (Vernon Chalmers Photography)
Biography and Professional ContextVernon Chalmers established Vernon Chalmers Photography in Milnerton, Cape Town, in the 2010s and has since formed a multi-faceted practice that blends commercial training, wildlife and nature photography, and reflective writing on photographic theory (Chalmers, n.d.). His geographic focus - Intaka/ Woodbridge Island, Milnerton Lagoon and Kirstenbosch Botanical Garden - anchors his work in identifiable Cape Town ecologies, giving his images both a local specificity and a broader natural-historical resonance. His public-facing activities include one-on-one Canon training courses, workshops, and online portfolio presentation, which collectively reveal an artist who is both teacher and practitioner, one who articulates technique alongside philosophical reflection about seeing. These elements of biography are important because they explain the hybrid character of Chalmers’ practice: an artisanal attention to camera technique and colour control combined with a sustained interest in how images shape experience. (Vernon Chalmers Photography)
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| Reed Cormorant Flying Through The Fog : Table Bay Nature Reserve |
To read Chalmers’ photography as “colour existential” is to insist that colour serves not merely descriptive ends but existential ones: colour becomes a medium for exploring presence, temporality, and affect. Existential photography, in this usage, draws on themes from continental philosophy - especially phenomenology - where perception and meaning-making are inseparable from embodied attention (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2012). Colour here becomes the vehicle through which the photographer stages micro-encounters with the world: a sun-tilted wing, a shaft of reflected water, a bloom’s saturated petal. Chalmers’ own writings and workshop language emphasize observational discipline, the affective register of natural scenes, and the ethical demands of witnessing. Hence, an interpretive frame that foregrounds colour as existential technique aligns well with the artist’s publicly stated interests in presence and perception. (Vernon Chalmers Photography)
Formal Strategies: Palette, Light, and CompositionAcross Chalmers’ portfolio, several recurrent formal strategies can be isolated: selective saturation, careful modulation of highlights and shadows, and compositions that isolate a subject within a field of negative space. These strategies reflect a disciplined attention to the camera’s capacity to “translate” what a viewer might otherwise pass by. Selective saturation - where certain hues such as blues, ochres, and verdant greens are emphasized - functions to anchor objects emotionally and temporally: an evening sky becomes not only a background but a mood. Chalmers often favours tight cropping for birds in flight, which elevates wing gestures into almost sculptural motifs; conversely, in landscape and botanical work, he uses generous negative space so that colour fields operate as existential grounds for contemplation. On the technical side, his portfolio and training materials show deliberate mastery of exposure, fast shutter speeds for motion capture, and lens choices that separate subject from background while preserving tonal subtlety - techniques that enable controlled, painterly uses of colour without sacrificing documentary clarity. (Vernon Chalmers Photography)
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| Little Egret Fishing : Diep River, Woodbridge Island |
A defining feature of Chalmers’ approach is pedagogical emphasis on “seeing” as a practiced activity rather than an instantaneous apprehension. His training offerings and theoretical posts encourage students to slow down: to watch the movement of water, to wait for wing-beat rhythms, to notice how light sculpts colour over time. This slow-looking pedagogy is congruent with phenomenological approaches that consider perception an active, temporally extended process (Smith, 2012). Practically, it translates into photographic work that resists instantaneous click-and-share culture and instead privileges the accumulation of small perceptual insights - colour shifts, reflective micro-gestures, and fleeting alignments - that together produce images suffused with contemplative charge. Chalmers’ public statements about workshops and his theory posts underline this combination of practice and reflection: the camera is a tool for cultivating a certain world-attentiveness. (Vernon Chalmers Photography)
Chalmers’ images often communicate feeling without resorting to overt sentimentality. Rather than saturating colour to create gaudy or hyperreal effects, he tends toward restraint: richer midtones, carefully controlled highlights, and an evident respect for tonal integrity. This measured handling produces photographs that are emotionally present without being melodramatic - an affective register that is consistent with existential thought, which tends to emphasize earnestness, ambiguity, and the contingent rather than dramatic resolution. For instance, a photograph of a heron framed against a muted Cape sunset might function as a meditation on solitude; the bird is not anthropomorphized but remains a locus through which human viewers confront their finitude and attentive responsibilities. The emotional work is therefore subtle and embedded in colour relations—hues and juxtapositions that invite dwelling rather than immediate reaction. (Vernon Chalmers Photography)
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| Levaillant's Cisticola : Woodbridge Island |
Chalmers’ frequent subject, birds, is an apt vehicle for existential photography. Birds in flight embody transience, agency, and relationality: they are creatures that travel across boundaries between water, land, and sky. Chalmers’ images of winged subjects - captured with high shutter speeds, compressed backgrounds, and colour-sensitive exposures - create a visual grammar where avian motion becomes a metaphor for the human condition. The bird’s solitude or flocking behavior can be read as commentaries on human sociality, freedom, and the ethics of interspecies attention. Photographs that emphasize the bird’s integration - whether in a sunlit reedbed or against a cobalt sky - invite viewers to reflect on how human presence interrupts, witnesses, or participates in natural scenes. In short, the images enact a phenomenological meeting between human observer and nonhuman subject mediated by colour and light. (Vernon Chalmers Photography)
Technique as Moral PracticeA notable feature of Chalmers’ public-facing practice is how technical mastery is framed as an ethical responsibility. His workshops and training materials position correct exposure, careful lens choice, and respect for subject-space as moral acts: to photograph responsibly is to minimize disturbance, to represent accurately, and to cultivate an attentiveness that benefits both photographer and subject. This is particularly salient in bird photography, where stealth and patience are prerequisites for ethically attuned capture. Aligning technical standards with ethical commitments resonates with recent scholarship on conservation photography and visual ethics (Wells, 2018), where technical choices shape how subjects are presented and, consequently, how audiences empathize or act. Chalmers’ pedagogy thus weaves craft and conscience together - colour choices are not simply aesthetic but part of a moral grammar of representation. (Vernon Chalmers Photography)
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| Milnerton Beach After Sunset |
Though Chalmers’ images are often locally grounded - Milnerton Lagoon, Woodbridge Island, and the Cape’s botanical settings - they participate in global conversations about habitat, biodiversity, and the visually mediated politics of conservation. Colour becomes an index of ecological condition: the sallow of a reed, the glossy plumage of a wading bird, the polluted sheen on a lagoon - these chromatic cues signal environmental health and human impact. By making color legible and affective, Chalmers’ photographs can function as documents that both celebrate and question the state of local ecologies. This local-global tension - images rooted in specific places but readable as part of wider environmental narratives - makes Chalmers’ work relevant beyond regional audiences. (Vernon Chalmers Photography)
Chalmers’ public presence - through an active website, Instagram portfolio, and professional listings - indicates how his practice is distributed across pedagogy, commerce, and public-facing art. His digital footprint shows a dual commitment: to instruct (camera training, workshops) and to share images that prompt reflective looking. This multiplicity of roles complicates simplistic classifications (e.g., commercial vs. fine art), but it also amplifies his potential cultural reach. Online engagement - comments on posts, workshop sign-ups - suggest that his work resonates with hobbyists and emerging practitioners seeking both technical skill and philosophical orientation toward their subjects. The pedagogical dimension thus functions as an extension of his existential aims: teaching others to see with care is itself an ethical-political act. (Vernon Chalmers Photography)
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| Little Egret Flying over the Diep River : Woodbridge Island |
Comparative Notes: Chalmers among Contemporary Colour Practitioners
Placed alongside other contemporary colour photographers who use hue as existential cue - think of practitioners who combine landscape with reflective subjectivity - Chalmers is notable for his explicit pedagogical orientation and his rootedness in Cape Town ecologies. Where some colour photographers pursue hyperreal or experimental palettes, Chalmers’ restraint and documentary commitments align him more closely with photographers who balance aesthetic refinement and documentary responsibility. This balance is particularly visible in bird photography, where accuracy (for species identification and conservation) and atmospheric use of colour must coexist. Thus, Chalmers’ practice exemplifies a synthesis: technical precision, pedagogical outreach, and philosophical reflection. (Vernon Chalmers Photography)
Conclusion: The Existential Capacities of Colour PhotographyVernon Chalmers’ work demonstrates how colour can be enlisted as a philosophical tool: to slow perception, to register affect without melodrama, and to mediate ethical relations between humans and the nonhuman. His combined roles as teacher, practitioner, and writer produce a practice in which technical mastery and reflective seeing are mutually reinforcing. While questions remain - about accessibility, curatorial framing, and political efficacy - Chalmers’ colour existential photography offers an important model for practice in which attending to hue, light, and gesture becomes a mode of world-engagement. In a media ecology often dominated by speed and spectacle, photographers who commit to the patient work of chromatic seeing perform a subtle but powerful kind of resistance: they teach viewers to dwell, to notice, and to carry that noticing into the world. As Chalmers continues to exhibit, teach, and write, his contribution will likely be best understood not merely through individual images but through the sustained practice of attentive, colour-inflected looking that his workshops and writings propagate. (Vernon Chalmers Photography)" (Source: ChatGPT 2025)
ReferencesChalmers, V. (n.d.). Vernon Chalmers Photography. Retrieved October 1, 2025, from Vernon Chalmers Photography website: Vernon Chalmers Photography. (Vernon Chalmers Photography)
Chalmers, V. (2023/2025). The theory of photography [Blog post]. Vernon Chalmers Photography. Retrieved from Vernon Chalmers Photography. (Vernon Chalmers Photography)
Chalmers, V. (2025, July). The future of photography [Blog post]. Vernon Chalmers Photography. (Vernon Chalmers Photography)
Vernon Chalmers Photography Training. (2025, March 12). SA Business Listings. Retrieved from sabusinesslistings.co.za. (SA Business Listings)
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945/2012). Phenomenology of perception (D. A. Landes, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 1945.)
Smith, D. W. (2012). Phenomenology (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Wells, L. (2018). Photography and conservation ethics [Edited volume]. (Note: Representative reference for conservation and visual ethics literature.)
Image Copyright: Vernon Chalmers Photography