Choose from the Americas (USD) or Global (GBP) websites to see content specific to your location and shop online.

Discover our improved returns policy

Complimentary delivery with the Explora club

Westley Richards

+44 (0)121 333 1900

Group 3 Created with Sketch.
Request a brochure
Contact Us
Delivery & Returns
Your browser is out of date!

In order for us to provide you with the very best experience while visiting our websites, you must use an up-to-date browser.

Update my browser now

Blog Post Featured Image

‘Another Life’ by Tito West

These days Tito West guides people on safaris but fifteen years ago he was a freshly graduated geology student heading to Africa, trying to find a place for himself in the world. While working as an apprentice professional hunter, he found himself gravitating more and more to the camera and he ultimately decided to change course - from becoming a professional hunter to exploring the world with his camera.

Tito, a native of south Texas, no longer feels at home in the United States. “Africa is my home”, he said when he caught up with us recently. Having spent the last decade on long stints in several African countries, he was talking from his study in the US, where he had joined his wife and children.

Gathering a young family around him, despite a decade of itinerance, has caused him to re-evaluate and this reflection has been the catalyst for the publication of what is a very personal photo book of observations and moments captured during his travels.

Tito is mindful that the last fifteen years’ of work represent a period in his life that has now passed. With young children and a wife, who have become his primary focus, he knows that the ingénue who took the photographs we see here no longer looks at the world in the same way and will never do so again. The eye of the artist who captured these intimate images has forever re-focused.

“This is not photojournalism, it is not reportage; all that matters is the moment captured, the authenticity.” - Tito West

Any future work will be different because the phase of Tito’s life from which these pictures emanated is now over. “Now I’m finding a place in the world for my family, I’m done with that chapter”, he says.

‘Another Life’ in this context becomes clear. It is the life the young Tito observed in the countries in which he lived and worked, the people, the places, the animals the scenery. “These are an honest representation of my perspective” he muses, “a photo book should feel like a dream”.

This explains the absence of text among the photographs. They are given context in the back and introduced at the beginning but the visual journey is a deliberately ocular one, engaging the mind purely through images, as each page turns and presents a new perspective.

“People have pre-conceived ideas of Africa as a homogenous continent, or preconceptions about what a country like Ethiopia is. Deliberately leaving context out of the images allows the viewer to experience a sense of discovery, very much in the way that I did when I saw these places for the first time”. Photographs presented this way engage the reader without preconception, the image speaks for itself and any explanation, if required, is found later.

This remarkable first edition, a very personal and poignant tribute to fifteen years ensconced in deepest Africa, published in May 2024, is limited to just one thousand copies.

Tito’s photographs, numbering ninety-nine, in this large format, text-free photo essay on life in the wilder places of the continent, are effortlessly emotional, stirring and captivating. They link places, people, animals, activity and spirit and they range across hunting preserves from Tanazania to Cameroon, Ethiopia to Botswana from South Africa to Zambia.

The intimacy of these photographs is immediately apparent; a photographer at ease with his subjects, be they human, geographical, feline or pachyderm, able to capture the true essence of a moment; the attitude, the time of day, the weight of heat and humidity, afternoon dust and morning mist.

Tito captures his subjects, not with sharp-focus compositions, but rather with the photo-journalist’s eye for a story, though he would eschew the moniker. “This is not photojournalism, it is not reportage; all that matters is the moment captured, the authenticity.”

“I like the silence of a photograph.” - Tito West

Each one appears to be conveying a message, be it the challenge of an old male lion, the day’s end content of the flickering campfire at dusk or the melancholy of the last bastions of deep rainforest in a world inexorably closing in.

Another Life is a rare and beautiful portrait of a life those of us fortunate enough to have hunted or travelled in Africa will recognize in essence, spirit and atmosphere. “The best photos are unconscious, they come out of love for the moment”.

Tito captured his subjects, mostly using old Nikon film cameras, though some very early ones are digital. Tito’s approach is unlike a professional photographer’s, he does not try to compose the perfect image, rather he was trying “to experience life; the camera allows me to do that’, which is largely why he prefers the still to the moving image.

“I like the silence of a photograph”; Tito thinks it so much more instinctive, momentary and unobtrusive compared to the effort required to introduce a film camera to a scene and the disruption it involves.

Tito never envisaged a book project until a mentor he respected observed that the printed picture is everything and the calling card for the true photographer is a photo book. That prompted a nine-year process, culminating in the publication of Another Life.

Tito has done everything himself, rather than calling in professionals to create a polished product. What he has created is akin to the first album of a rock band, he says, “there is a lot I would change, it is imperfect, but imperfections don’t bother me, it is made by me, it is personal and authentic, it includes my naivety and my innocence, which are part of the story”.

These evocative snap-shots of moments in time capture the continent as we love it and sometimes as we fear for it.  They are authentic visual memories observed by a remarkable artist trying to document his experiences through the lens, capturing life as it was, through the window on the world he had for a few short years.

Just as Tito will never again be that person, the places, people and animals depicted will never be the same as they were at that time. Another Life captures a recent past, what L.P. Hartley once called ‘...a foreign country’.

Another Life makes a unique gift or a beautiful addition to the library, gun-room or study. Available exclusively from Westley Richards.

 


 

The Explora Blog is the world’s premier online journal for field sports enthusiasts, outdoor adventurers, conservationists and admirers of bespoke gunmaking, fine leather goods and timeless safari clothes. Each month Westley Richards publishes up to 8 blog posts on a range of topics with an avid readership totalling 500,000+ page views per year.

Blog post topics include: Finished custom rifles and bespoke guns leaving the Westley Richards factory; examples of heritage firearms with unique designs and celebrated owners like James Sutherland and Frederick Courteney Selous; the latest from the company pre-owned guns and rifles collection; interviews with the makers from the gun and leather factory; new season safari wear and country clothing; recent additions to our luxury travel bags and sporting leather goodsrange; time well spent out in the field; latest news in the sporting world; and key international conservation stories.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published