What the Marsh Holds

Maasai Mara, Kenya 2023

I like photographs with a sense of place. Sometimes you understand more about the animal when you see the world around it. That was the idea here — to make a layered photograph of these two elephants roaming a marsh, with everything that the marsh holds visible around them. The water, the reflection, the grass, the tree line, the sky.

This kind of image is harder than a tight portrait. A face crop is a cleaner problem — find the expression, control the background, make the frame. A scene like this is full of visual clutter, and every element in the frame either adds to the meaning or pulls it apart. My approach was to predict the movement of the two animals, see where they were going to be in relation to the water and the light, and wait until everything aligned. Most of the time it does not align. The elements pull in different directions and you are left with a frame that has too much in it and says nothing.

This one aligned. The foreground elephant walked into the right of the frame. The second elephant stepped into his reflection in the marsh. The light held. For a few seconds everything was in the right place and I had the composition I had been waiting for.

This is from The Heart of the Wild. An environmental portrait of two of the most magnificent creatures on this planet, moving through the kind of place they have always moved through. The marsh holds the water they drink and the reflection of their bodies and the memory of everything that has ever passed through it. I wanted an image that held all of that at once.