Poised

Maasai Mara, Kenya 2023

Cheetahs look better from the side. The silhouette is what carries them — the long line of the back, the lifted head, the leg up mid-step. I always try to reveal that shape. The tall grass around her gave me a stage to put her on. I held the camera as low as I could from the vehicle window and let her rise out of the grass like a form coming out of an abstract field.

The light was at the edge of being too harsh. Most photographers would not have worked that hour. But the harsh shadows built the structure of her — the muscle definition, the spots catching different angles of light, the depth in the body. They gave a three-dimensional look to the world's fastest mammal. Sometimes the difficult light is the right light.

This image is from The Heart of the Wild. I want to make portraits of these animals, not documents. That means thinking about how the animal sits inside the frame the way a portrait photographer thinks about a person inside a room. The grass is not background here. It is composition. The light is not lighting. It is structure. I am making these decisions in the field but I am already seeing the print on a wall.

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.