The Wild Ones

Maasai Mara, Kenya 2023

Photographing four individual animals in one frame is hard. Photographing four young cheetah cubs in one frame, all doing something interesting at the same time, is a matter of alignment and luck in almost equal parts. Many things have to come together for a composition like this to hold. Most of the time the cubs scatter before you get anything.

What I wanted to show here is the bond between the four of them. They are playing, learning through play, getting curious about everything happening around them. The one standing up against the tree is investigating. The others are watching, leaning into each other, close. Cheetah cubs learn most of what they will need to survive from this kind of play. Without a mother around full-time in a few months, play is what will keep them alive.

This playfulness is something I think we lose. Not just cheetah cubs growing into alert, anxious adults — us too. As we grow up we forget how to play. We treat it as something for children, something unproductive, something to be put aside for the real work of adult life. But it is not unproductive. It is how we stay balanced. It is how we stay relaxed inside a modern world that is stressful and often toxic. These four cubs do not know any of that. They are just being what they are. That is the lesson.

This image is from The Heart of the Wild. I do not photograph wildlife to document it. I photograph because the natural world still carries things the modern world has mostly forgotten. Sometimes the lesson is in a sovereign lion or a mother carrying her cub. Sometimes it is in four young cheetahs at the base of a tree on a quiet morning.