What Stillness Holds

Maasai Mara, Kenya 2023

This is the king staring at his kingdom. That is the memory the moment gave me. A male lion lying in the grass at the edge of a plain that belongs to him, looking out across it. Not at me, not at anything specific — at everything. At the land he owns simply by being born on it.

I think of this photograph as an environmental portrait. Most of my lion work is tight — the face, the mane, the eyes locked on the lens. This one needed the opposite. The lion had to sit inside his world. The sky had to be most of the frame. The grass had to come up around him. A tight crop would have taken away the thing that makes the image what it is: the relationship between this animal and the land around him.

A quiet moment is harder to photograph than a dramatic one. Drama announces itself. Quiet has to be recognized. You have to see a lion lying in grass, notice where his eyes are pointed, and understand that the frame you want is not him — it is him and the sky and the plain all together. Most photographers will keep driving looking for action. This was the image I stopped for.

This is from The Heart of the Wild. I do not photograph wildlife to document it. I photograph it because this earth is the home of animals like this one, and it is also ours. The Mara is his kingdom. It is also ours to protect. An image like this is a quiet reminder of why we should care about the land we share with everything else that lives on it.