Cities gone wild

Corey Arnold's reportage of wild animals thriving in the human-built landscape achieved first place in the Wildlife and Nature category at the 2023 Sony World Photography Awards. Peter Dench finds out more

- Peter Dench

American photographer Corey Arnold has some tales to tell. ‘There’s one point in South Lake Tahoe when I was photographing a bear in a dumpster,’ he recalls, ‘and I was backing up into a shadowy area and all of a sudden behind me I heard a huge snort and a Whuuump!! and a big black bear had pulled up a bag of garbage and was just hiding in the shadows eating his own bag of garbage while the other bear was inside the garbage dumpster. Bears have incredible stealth for how massive they are, they can just creep around so gently. That was pretty scary, I think I lost a couple of years of my life after that.’

Arnold had experience photographing racoons when he was studying photography. After graduating in 1999, shooting a major reportage on racoons remained a back-burner ambition. After a successful first assignment for National Geographic photographing the selfie generation and national parks, he successfully applied for a grant to shoot his raccoons, but with a couple of animals added. ‘I was a little intimidated when they decided to put on coyotes and bears because I was a little less familiar,’ he says. ‘I grew up with coyotes in my backyard in southern California but they were so elusive, skittish. Most of my cats I’m pretty sure were eaten by coyotes, they would live to about four years old but then they would usually get eaten.’