He is asleep inside the bush, or nearly. The mane is a continent unto itself; everything else is the small mechanical traffic of a face — the eye not quite closed, the breath even, a thin cloud of gnats finding the wet places of the nose and not being chased away.
This is one of the first pictures. It is also, in a way, the image the work will keep coming back to: an animal not interested in being one, photographed close enough that the camera feels like an intrusion the lion has decided to forgive.
She is there before you see her. A second cat, settled in the same patch of cover — head up, eyes narrow against what light the leaves still let through. The bush is not large, and they have arranged themselves inside it like people in a small room, both pretending they are alone.
The lioness has come into the shade beside him.
Out of the leaves and through the long grass.
Then she stands. The portrait stops being a portrait. She walks forward through the stalks with her head low and her weight already on the front feet — the kind of posture that decides a whole evening in advance of any of its photographs.
The first mating is in cover — a single burst inside the bush, the camera catching the male over her shoulders, her face turned away. The whole act is held in one frame; a beat later he is gone.
The first mating, in cover.
The male alone, just after — mouth open, panting.
He is alone again at the bush's edge, mouth open, the breath visible in the late light. The frame is full of breath and grass and nothing else. Watching him, the lens also slows down.
Two ways of being still — sitting up to the light, or sideways into it.
A note on cover
For all the openness of the Mara, lions spend half their lives at the edges of things — under thorn, against a mound, in a fold of grass tall enough to hide a tail. The first half of this evening was photographed through that geometry: leaves at every depth of the frame, light arriving in pieces, the pair almost composed by the bush itself.
The bush, then the sky. A short interval inside the leaves, and the rest of the evening on the open ground.
“The bush hid the first act. The sky admitted the second.
”
Two earth mounds, twenty feet of grass between.
When the camera finds them again, the cover is gone. They are out on the plain on two adjacent earth mounds — she upright on one, he flat on the other. The sky has gone pale and there is no animal in the frame except them. The same pair, the same intention; the room has just got very large.
The plain holds them like two commas on the same line.
Over the next stretch they take turns being the alert one. She sits up, then lowers; he raises his head, then lays it down; a yawn opens and closes; the gnats find them on the open ground as readily as they found them in the leaves. Nothing changes that you could put a clock to.
She watches; he does not.
He has crossed the distance.
He gets up. He crosses the small distance between the mounds — a walk so casual it almost reads as accidental — and stands over her on her mound, head lowered to hers. This is the preamble the bush did not allow. The sky behind them is already cooler than the grass.
The second act is everything the first one wasn't: visible, held across more frames, the bodies low and matched on the mound, the light blue-grey at the edges. The whole shape of the first act is in it — approach, snarl, mount, dismount — only the room has changed.
The second mating, in the open this time.
The dismount, in the last useful light.
Afterwards they take the same posture they took at the bush — he flat, she upright — but the geometry has reversed. He is on her mound, not his. The sky has nearly given up its colour. There will not be many more frames.
Thornlight
Thornlight
A short while later they have not moved. She is upright over his collapsed body on her mound; the horizon is a single grey band; the frame is mostly sky. The hour has reset around them, and the position has swapped, and that is the whole story.
One pair, one evening, the same brief act repeated under two different skies — first inside the green-gold weave of a thornbush, then out under a pale-to-blue sky on two adjacent earth mounds. The whole evening is held by that rhyme. The Rekero pride.
- Camera
- Canon EOS R5 Mark II · Canon EOS R6
- Lens
- Sigma 500mm f/4 DG OS HSM Sports · Canon RF 70–200mm f/2.8 L IS USM Z
