Matriarch (b&w)

Maasai Mara Kenya 2010
An edition of 75 in all sizes

This picture was made in 2010 at a time when ground level pictures were still in their infancy. In an ever crowding world of low angle photography, this one appears to be surviving well.

It was taken before cameras had flip out screens, with a wide-angle lens and attached to a monopod. The monopod was suspended upside down out of a vehicle window in order to get it close to the ground and it was pretty much aimed blind. But in time one learns to keep the subject in frame with more consistency, as opposed to photographing inordinate amounts of sky or ground. The keeper rate goes up by a good bit with a little practice.

We'd also discovered a way to have the elephants come to us, rather than have to go after them. That's good for both us and the elephant. Using the monopod as one would a joystick, the composition can be arranged to either avoid foliage or to include it, just as the long grass stems were here.

She was around fifty-five years old in 2010. Her family was ahead of her, just out of frame. A lasting impression of her is of calm confidence as she approached, dug up some green shoots, before she swung away. She never took her eye off us during the whole encounter.

For the print, a final flourish was inspired by an old darkroom process. Bob Carlos-Clarke was a photographer active in the 1980s and renowned for his darkroom technique of toning prints with selenium on fibre based paper (something I also experimented with at the time). Those plum tones he achieved in the darkroom was the inspiration for the final treatment of this picture.