Wild life through a lens

The emphasis on detail and form in the photographs of Randall Gray belies a resolutely undisciplined approach to work and travel. Not for him some meticulously planned expedition up the Limpopo to snap a lost tribe or vanishing species. "Life is connected to everything," he'll have you know, in Californian tones more trance-inducing than a massage. "When you live life, it will bring something to your work."

The edgy, ritualistic images from a Cameroon funeral he snapped while staying with a theology student friend-turned-Catholic priest, posted to the depths of the North West Province. "By chance there was a funeral going on," he recalls. "I could photograph it because I was a friend of a priest.

"I've tried 'making trips' and come back with nothing," he says, recounting a mission to the Venice Carnival from which he returned with shots of "costumes, people". Unsuccessful. By contrast - and chance - a river voyage in Zaire netted the unsettling vision of two trussed lizards coiled in desperate mouth-to-mouth conflict as they waited to be bought, slain and cooked. "All up and down the river people bring food on board to sell you - if it's live they know they'll get more money."

In the reptiles, with their "uniqueness of shape, details of scales", Gray saw a visual metaphor for the country: "The picture reflects Mobutu's Zaire; people trussed up in a political way and turning on each other." Black + White + Gray, an exhibition of about 50 of Gray's works opening next week at the Association of Photographers in Shoreditch summarises 15 years of the man's peregrinations in America, Western Europe and Africa, in search of the "gestural dramatic" in everything from North American flora to Central African fauna, all snapped with his trusty Leica R5.

Randall Gray: Black + White + Gray runs from Tuesday to 9 September at the Association Gallery, 81 Leonard Street, EC2 (020 7739 6669).