Breaking Free

Maasai Mara, Kenya 2023

A young zebra running for its life. The truth is a cheetah was chasing him and his mother. It was a tense moment. Everything went well for the young one and the cheetah had to try another time. But in a beautiful place like the Mara it is also wild — a constant fight for survival, every day.

I went with a slow shutter and panned with him as he ran past. I wanted the body sharp and everything around to move. The blur is what makes the image — without it you lose the speed, the urgency, the sense that he is running for something. With it you can almost feel his legs working under him.

This image belongs to The Heart of the Wild, made over two weeks in the Maasai Mara. So much happens there at once — lions and elephants on the same open plain, herds moving through yellow grass, dramatic clouds in the morning, hard sun by midday. The first days I was reactive, shooting too much. Somewhere in the middle of the trip I slowed down and started waiting for the moments that carried weight instead of chasing every animal that moved. This one I did not wait for. It happened in front of me and I had a fraction of a second to react.

Maybe one percent of what I shot over two weeks survived the edit. If an image did not make me feel something it was just documentation, and documentation is not the work. This frame is about survival, not the chase. The cheetah is not in the picture and that is on purpose. What is in the picture is one young animal, alive, moving fast, making it through one more day.