Memory of Dust

Maasai Mara, Kenya 2023

I worked the whole morning for this one. Elephants are always a great subject for me, but I wanted a profile portrait that really connects — and for that you have to wait for the expression. You sit and you watch and most of the time the face is doing nothing, just being an elephant. Then for a second something shifts. To me this looks like a smile. A feel-good moment from the animal world. That is what I was waiting for all morning.

The dust on the tusks and around the eye is not staged. It is what was there. A detail of truth from a place where animals live in the dust and carry it on their bodies. I wanted the crop tight so the focus stayed on the face — the wrinkles, the eye, the mud on the ivory. Nothing else around to soften it.

This image belongs to The Heart of the Wild, two weeks of working in the Maasai Mara out of a tent camp deep in the park. Up before sunrise, out in the jeep, back when the light got hard. Then out again until sunset. 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 instead of chasing them. A morning like this one would not have happened in the first week. It happened because I had stopped trying to make things happen and started letting them.

I do not photograph wildlife to document it. I photograph because the natural world still carries something modern life has mostly lost. These images are not a mourning of what is disappearing. They are proof that it still exists.