‘Scrambling to catch this shot felt like 3D chess,” says photographer Mike Wells. “My eyes were balancing Connemara’s famous mountains, its wild ponies and the stone walls, while my mind computed the variables: the rush to catch the last rays of evening sun, that moment when a sea breeze lifts the ponies’ manes, and whichever way they will amble next.”
In 1981, Wells won the World Press Photo of the Year for an image shot in Uganda depicting a malnourished boy’s hand resting in the palm of a Catholic priest. “When I was working in the 1970s and 80s, unless you could afford a motor drive for your camera, you often got just one chance at the critical shot,” Wells says. “You could never tell whether you really had captured the moment until you got back from Africa, or at least out of the darkroom. That image wasn’t well lit or well composed, just grabbed in the moment as an Italian missionary priest showed me the hand of a starving boy, one of those they were trying to save by emptying their mission’s grain stores.”
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Wells adds that while he is “older, slower” now, and doesn’t often take photos, the familiar electric charge as the elements of an image seem to fall into place remains the same. “You still don’t get a second try at a shot like this: the sun will have set, or the horses wandered off, or both,” he says. “The difference today is that you get your answer at once – it’s wonderful not to have to wait days or weeks to find out if the moment was as special or important as your instinct insisted it was.”
