East Africa • Kenya and Tanzania
The land that called me home
I had dreamed of Africa since I was a child. Not a plan — just a pull. Something I carried without knowing what to do with it.
I went for the first time during a period of change. I wasn’t looking to photograph anything. I was looking for something I couldn’t name yet — purpose, maybe, or just proof that the world was larger than the one I was leaving behind.
I didn’t find it. It found me.
What I wasn’t prepared for was the scale of it. Not just the landscape — the wildness, the age of everything, and right alongside it, how close the animals were to losing the land they needed to survive. Both things at once. That was the thing I couldn’t have imagined from photographs.
Some places change you in ways you don’t discover until you’re somewhere else. Africa is one of those places.
Like a great love story, some places live within us forever.
The scent of the wild stays long after the light goes.
Sky burning gold, then amber, then nothing —
dust and sun still on your skin.
The day’s sounds have quieted.
Somewhere out there, something moves.
Under stars too many to name,
you feel your own smallness,
and find it enough.
My first night in Africa, I was in Tsavo East. The camp was unfenced.
I sat outside long after I should have gone in. The sky was enormous. Everything was sounds I didn’t have names for.
In the morning, there were leopard tracks around the camp.
I have been coming back ever since. That feeling — of being in a place that is entirely itself, entirely indifferent to your presence, and entirely worth your attention — doesn’t go away.
“When you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find that it is the same in all her music.”
Karen Blixen, Out of Africa
THE LAND
Africa’s soil is laterite — iron-rich, the colour of rust, shaped by centuries of rain and heat. A single wind drapes you in it. By noon, your morning clothes have surrendered to the sun.
The light at six in the evening in Kenya does something I have never seen anywhere else. It turns everything warm and slow, and the dust catches it and makes it visible. I have shot some of my best images in those twenty minutes.
This is a continent of specifics. Not one Africa — many. Northern Kenya is not the Serengeti is not Amboseli is not the Laikipia Plateau. Each place has its own animals, its own silences, its own way of teaching you patience. I have spent years learning to hear the differences.
Africa holds a third of the earth’s biodiversity. Standing inside it, that number starts to make sense.
THE WILDLIFE
The animals I photograph are not backdrop. They are the reason I am here.
I have followed lion prides at Namiri Plains in the Serengeti, knowing individual animals by name and history. I have sat with Baraka at Ol Pejeta — a blind black rhino who walks toward you with a steadiness that takes time to process. I have watched Long’uro at Reteti navigate the world with half a trunk and complete composure.
These are not wild animals in the abstract. They are specific creatures living specific lives. That is what makes photographing them both a privilege and a responsibility.
THE PEOPLE
The Samburu have lived alongside these animals for generations. They are not background to a landscape — they are the reason large parts of northern Kenya still exist as wild land.
I photograph indigenous communities with the same attention I give the animals: slowly, without agenda, with permission. These portraits are not documentation. They are a record of a relationship between people and land that has endured what most relationships haven’t.
This work is as much about the people as it is about the wildlife. It always has been.
Rangers, Threats & Named Partners
Africa’s wildlife is not disappearing in the abstract. It is disappearing in specific places, from specific causes, at rates that are measurable and reversible — if the resources are there.
Two rangers die in the line of duty every week. They are not statistics to the people who work alongside them. They are the front line of something that most of the world benefits from and few people fund.
Habitat loss, poaching, and human-wildlife conflict are not separate threats. They are the same pressure, applied from different directions, on animals that need corridors to survive.
WHERE I WORK
I choose where I stay the same way I choose what to photograph: based on what the place is actually doing for the land and the animals around it.
Every conservancy I work in has earned its place in this list — through the quality of their land stewardship, their relationships with local communities, and the kind of unhurried access they give to genuine wildlife encounters.
AMBOSELI
Elephant country. Kilimanjaro on the horizon when the sky is clear. I have spent more time here than anywhere else in Africa.
SERENGETI
Lions at Namiri Plains. Leopards in the trees and long grass. The Serengeti is where I return when I need to photograph predators in genuine territory.
SAMBURU
Northern Kenya at its most distinctive. Grevy’s Zebra, Reticulated Giraffe, and the Samburu communities who have protected this land for generations.
LOISABA
The Laikipia Plateau. Leopard country. Loshami, the melanistic leopard, moves through these hills still. Wide skies and long distances. A conservancy doing serious work.
OL PEJETA
Baraka the blind black rhino has lived here since 2000. Najin and Fatu — the last two northern white rhinos on earth — are here. This conservancy is doing some of the most important work in Africa.
SOLIO
Southern White Rhinos and Reticulated Giraffes. A private conservancy that has been central to Kenya’s rhino recovery for decades.
LEWA-BORANA
Grevy’s Zebra territory. 14% of Kenya’s total black rhino population. A landscape that rewards slow travel and patient mornings.
