Wild Ocean is both visual feast

Peter and Beverly Pickford's Wild Ocean: A Journey to the Earth's Last Wild Coasts is filled with photographs so luminous that one almost hears the crash of the sea moving through its pages.

- By Don Pinnock

Elephant seal pup, South Georgia, off Antarctica.

(Photos: Peter & Beverly Pickford Wildlife Photography)

It's a meditation on the beauty, fragility and mystery of the marine world, written and photographed with the clear conviction of two people who have devoted their lives to bearing witness to wildness before it disappears.

The Pickfords are veteran South African wildlife photographers and this book distils four years of global fieldwork across the five great oceans from the Transkei's surf-pounded cliffs to the atolls of the Seychelles, from the coral gardens of Ningaloo in Western Australia to Cuba's pristine Jardines de la Reina. Their project is monumental in scope but deeply human in tone: it's a travelogue of awe, anger and moral reckoning.

At 35cm high it's a really big book, but that gives generous space to display the photographs. There are also no page numbers so you get uncluttered spreads of nearly half a metre wide.

The book opens with an intimate childhood memory: Peter learning to swim in the cold seaside pool of his South African hometown, coached by a man who encouraged rather than scolded.