The Approach

Maasai Mara, Kenya 2023

He was walking back to his pride after a hunt that did not work. We had been in the area all morning looking for something and we were the only car around. When I saw him coming I leaned out the window with the camera as low as I could get it, almost dragging in the grass. He walked right past us. The whole thing lasted maybe a minute. There was a fresh wound under his eye from the hunt. He never broke eye contact.

This image is from The Heart of the Wild. Two weeks in the Maasai Mara with Tinka and Jamlick, two Masai guides who knew the land and the animals better than I ever will. The trip itself started a long time before, when I was a kid in Greece watching The Lion King. That was the first time I felt something for wildlife. The Mara stayed with me for years after that, somewhere far away that I knew only from documentaries and films. Then one day I was on a small plane from Nairobi watching the plains open up below me.

I want to make portraits of these animals, not documents. That means being close. Close enough that the proximity is part of the image. I work for eye contact more than anything else. Hours of sitting and waiting, then a second, and most of the time the second never comes. This was one of the times it came.

Black and white is always my main choice. Color in the Mara is beautiful but it can pull your eye away from what matters. I want the skin, the weight, the eyes. Nothing else around. B&W takes the rest away and the animal has to hold the image on its own.