Wildlife/Animals nominee

Revered as the elephant god, used in labour-intensive forest exploitations and tourist entertainment sites, or still roaming free in isolated pockets of wilderness, Asian elephants are an essential part of South Asia’s cultures. Only bulls among Asian elephants may grow huge tusks, while cows have small incisor teeth called tushes. As a combined result of systematically catching bulls from the wild and isolating them in captivity, trophy hunting, and heavy poaching for ivory, the majority of the bulls in most of the Asian elephant populations are now tuskless (called maknas) or have very small tusks. Man-made reverse selection eliminated elephants with tusks-to-the-ground throughout Asia.
The longest tusks ever recorded on Asian elephants were around 3m and the heaviest reached some 160 pounds (73 kg) each.
Today only around a dozen great Asian tuskers still join the ranks of Colonel Hathi's jungle patrols, and most of them are captive.
This sub-project is part of my flagship project 'The World As It Once Was', which aims at identifying, photographing and saving the individuals with the most formidable genes left in the glorious giants of today.
Some of these pictures are already published by National Geographic and Wild Planet.

Dian is a multi-award winning fine art wildlife photographer, scientist, author, inspirational speaker and world records discoverer, specialised in world record and world class individuals in iconic megafauna species.
He creates timeless images by using an immersive approach, portraying as never seen before giants that have captured our imagination. He pays much attention not only to the subject selection, perspective and composition, but also to body postures. If a Statue, a Monument were to be raised to a species, what would that look like?
Dian is the author of the award-winning book The World As It One Was (2020), which combines arresting visuals with solid science. He supports local conservation projects in Africa with proceedings from his book and from fine art prints, including as a two-time contributor to Prints for Wildlife.
He was a member of the jury of the Golden Turtle Photography Awards (2023) and the Jackson Wild Film Festival (2022) and the curator of the exhibition Europe's Wild Heart (Brussels, 2019).
Dian has 10 years of artistic, scientific and conservation experience working with big-tusked African and Asian elephants and about 30 of his images were awarded or were finalists in prestigious photography competitions around the world.