I didn’t come to Africa to find something wild.
I came to find something true.
I left with the wild in my bones.
DEANNA DESHEA
Deanna DeShea is a fine art creator and conservationist. She started as a painter — canvas first, then murals — before a camera replaced the brush. The instinct is the same: look long enough, and everything reveals its composition.
She travels alone through Kenya and Tanzania — Loisaba in the Laikipia Plateau, the Namunyak Conservancy in Samburu, the plains of the Serengeti, Ol Pejeta, the elephant sanctuary at Reteti, and the conservancies of Borana and Solio — staying in lodges built around conservation, embedded in the landscapes she photographs. She doesn’t plan around spectacle. She follows what nature gives her.
She does not pursue the perfect shot. She pursues stillness. The image that earns its place not through drama, but through patience.
She travels as a woman through places most photographers pass through in days. That changes what you see. You notice differently when you are still, when you are not performing presence but actually present.
What she makes is fine art — work that lives in homes, in collections, in gallery spaces across the UK, Europe, and the United States. Each image is a limited edition. Each one makes a quiet case for the animal within it.
These photographs do not announce themselves. They ask something of you.
Through her work, art becomes an act of remembrance — holding space for what the world is learning to forget.
I make images because art remembers what the world is learning to forget.
I photograph what the world is in danger of losing. Not to document it — to make the case for it.
Art remembers.
And the people who live with this work remember too.
FROM THE FIELD
My first night
I first dreamed of Africa when I was ten years old.
I cannot tell you exactly what started it. But the continent took up residence in my imagination and never left — the animals, the light, the sense that something vast and ancient was unfolding somewhere, without me.
Then I learned about the rhinos.
The scale of what was happening to them — the poaching, the organised killing — went somewhere in me I couldn’t come back from. I wasn’t able to look away. I wanted to understand it properly. To stand in the same landscape. To see what was being fought for and what was being lost.
My life had changed in ways I hadn’t planned for. I was at one of those junctions where you either move toward something or you wait. I was done waiting.
I went with three close friends — women who are still among my closest now.
My first night was at Ithumba, in Tsavo East. I wrote about it because I didn’t know what else to do with it.
