Berk Toluk
Attending high school in Sydney’s Leafy suburbs, Berk had always enjoyed the visual arts. Despite pursuing a career in Law and still to this date being a qualified legal practitioner (with post-graduate degrees in Applied Finance), Berk has always liked to pick up his camera and venture out into the wilderness whenever he could.
Berk had often played in farm fields when visiting relatives as a child. Here, among cousins, friends, and animals, he felt more at home than in the inner city. As it turns out, being surrounded by nature and animals is also a more comfortable place for the adult Berk too. Here he gains a much greater sense of clarity and perspective on his life, more easily tuning-out the self-critical buzz. So every chance Berk gets he chooses to spend it amongst nature with Camera bag in tow.
Inspired by a copy of National Geographic he picked up at a doctor’s waiting room in late 2015, Berk began to develop an interest in photography. And just a few months after, he’d fully immersed himself in nature photography as a method of reconnecting with both himself and the world around him,
What began as a therapeutic hobby soon turned into a full-blown passion. And five years on, shooting nature and wildlife photography is now also Berk’s second profession. Berk has traveled to some of the remotest regions of Australia, Southeast Asia, and beyond, in search of ever more powerful landscape and wildlife images. Through his initiative, determination, and talent, today Berk has established himself as an important emerging artist within the field; with his beautiful fine art prints in ever greater demand from collectors and the general public alike.
Berk’s work has also been regularly featured by the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) and Sony Australia.
1984 – Born in Darlinghurst, Sydney 1984
2012 – Bachelor of Laws, University of New England, Armidale
2014 – Graduate Diploma in Legal Practice, College of Law, Sydney
2014 – Admitted as a Lawyer of the Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory and the High Court of Australia
2015 – Berk begins his journey with Wildlife and Landscape Photography
2019 – Berk joins “SEE”
2022- Graduate Certificate in Business (Applied Finance)
Artist Statement
I am a professional wildlife and landscape photographer based in Sydney, Australia, but frequently travelling much further afield in search of my subjects. Although my route to photography was a fairly atypical one, since discovering my calling I’ve wasted little time in fully dedicating myself to the art form. Now, whether navigating the inland waterways of Borneo by longboat, trekking through Arnhem Land on foot, or rising above a tropical canopy in a helicopter, it’s only with camera in hand and hiking boots on my feet that I truly come into my element.
However, as with many who have spent extended periods of time immersed in nature, it has quickly become apparent to me just how serious a threat human behavior poses to the fragile ecosystem that supports our lives. So although photography serves a distinctly cathartic purpose for me personally, my work is just as equally an attempt to draw greater public attention to the unbearable toll our current way of life is inflicting upon the natural world.
The human relationship with the environment and the other animals we share it with is characterized by consumption. We look on other lifeforms not as cohabitants that should be afforded protection rights equal to our own, but as resources that exist solely for our benefit. Not only is this attitude detrimental to the well-being of those entities unfortunate enough to live alongside us, but also to the planet more generally; and thus ultimately also to ourselves as a species.
Nonetheless, as pressing as the ecological crisis may be, I prefer to avoid sensationalism; instead favoring a more understated photographic approach. In reality most environments I visit today display clear signs of the damage caused by humans, hence there is no need to shock the audience into action by concentrating on extreme cases. In practice this means that I neither deliberately seek out signs of environmental destruction, nor try to avoid, hide, remove, or delete them from my work by digital or other means.
Rather, I try to highlight environmental issues in an objective and non-politicized manner, in the hope that the viewer will form her or his own conclusions. I like to think that the result is an unromantic and matter-of-fact portrayal of the natural world as it is today; beautiful, but nonetheless scarred. A portrayal that subtly underlines all that we stand to loose if we don’t take immediate and far-reaching steps to change our violently unsustainable way of life.