Join us for an amazing AMA (Ask Me Anything) session with Anna Morgan

Anna has been photographing landscapes on and off since her teenage years. The years from 2018 to 2021 were particularly transformative for her, when photography served both as a tool for reflective thinking and as a subject of research.

Now relocated to Vancouver Island with her family of four, her childhood experiences and fondest memories are deeply rooted in nature and an equal mixture of British and Spanish-Basque cultures. At school, she cherished learning about and practicing both arts and sciences, which in formal education settings are presented as different disciplines altogether. Like many youths, she faced the usual dichotomy of being forced to choose between one or the other, thus setting the ball rolling on a trajectory seemingly impossible to reverse. While she studied sciences, she refused to let go of art altogether, picking up a course in the history of art. Of course, that went by the wayside somewhat at vet school.

Having worked as a veterinarian in companion animal practice for the better part of 12 years, she began to feel the urge to give back and contribute to conservation in a more meaningful way. So, in 2016, she enrolled in the Conservation Medicine program, a postgraduate master’s for vets, at the University of Edinburgh. Her research brought photography and conservation together to examine the role of the conservation photographer, opening the door for her to explore her own self-awareness and bring a deeper understanding of the structural frameworks that underpin the premise of conservation photography. Even within such a transdisciplinary field as Conservation Medicine, this was a challenging study that delved into photographic theory, systems thinking, social justice, feminist theory, spiritual ecology, and Indigenous ways of knowing, to name but a few relevant fields.