ELEPHANT
Amboseli, Kenya · The Last Super Tuskers
The arrival
AMBOSELI, KENYA
MY FIRST SOLO JOURNEY
Amboseli was the first place I travelled to completely alone.
No guides arranged in advance. No one waiting. I knew no one there. I went because the super tuskers were there — and I needed to find them.
When we crossed the lake on arrival, I thought I had stepped inside a painting. The sun was soft and warm. Flamingos scattered across the water like stardust. Hundreds of birds. Hippos thundering through the green marsh. It smelled of fresh water and life.
Then, on the other side of the crossing — a large herd of elephants in golden green grass.
I had never felt so present in my life.
The next morning I told my lodge guide I only wanted to find Tim.
He warned me. Tim was hard to locate — he moved outside the park boundaries, following his own routes. Many people went looking and came back without him.
I had decided to stay outside the park, in the conservancy. The clay was golden red. The vehicle was open-topped — the kind that felt like something out of an old Hemingway film.
On our way out, that is where I found him.
WHAT THE ELEPHANT CARRIES
No animal has lived alongside human civilisation longer, or been more consistently misunderstood by it.
Elephants grieve. They return to the bones of their dead and stand with them. They communicate across miles through frequencies too low for human ears. They remember — specific places, specific individuals — across decades.
They are the only non-human animal confirmed to recognise themselves in a mirror.
What does that mean for how we treat them?
The elephant in symbolism carries memory, wisdom, and the weight of continuity — the animal that holds the past and moves slowly enough to carry it forward.
I have stood close enough to hear one breathe. What I felt was not awe at something wild and foreign.
What I felt was recognition.
Remove the elephant and the landscape changes. Not slowly. Visibly, within a generation.
Elephants are architects of their own ecosystem.
Their movement through the landscape creates water holes that other species depend on. Their feeding opens dense bush into clearings. The corridors they walk — some used for generations — shape the land itself. They walk up to 50 miles a day. They need corridors to do it. Those corridors are shrinking.
25 super tuskers remain on earth.
When Tim crossed the conservancy each morning, his tusks scraping the earth, he was the last of something the world is running out of time to protect.
The Amboseli Trust for Elephants has studied and protected the elephants of Amboseli for over four decades. Founded by Dr. Cynthia Moss, it is one of the longest-running wildlife research projects in the world — every elephant in Amboseli known by name, by family, by history.
I have visited their camp. I have sat with the people who have given their lives to understanding these animals and arguing for their survival.
The super tuskers Tim, Ulysses, and Craig were known to them. Documented, named, watched over for decades.
All three are now gone.
Tim died of natural causes. Ulysses died of natural causes. Craig died in January 2026. I photographed all three. I carry that as both a privilege and a responsibility.
These giants are bound together in this
uncompromising wilderness. Their first weapon is one another.
25
SUPER TUSKERS REMAIN
TIM. ULYSSES. CRAIG.
ALL THREE PHOTOGRAPHED IN AMBOSELI.
BLOOD IVORY
Asia, Europe, and the United States fuel a global ivory market built on corruption, greed, and a demand that has never fully been extinguished despite decades of bans and treaties.
An estimated 20,000 elephants are killed for their ivory every year.
The super tuskers are the most vulnerable. Their tusks — the very thing that makes them extraordinary — make them a target. A single tusk from a super tusker can weigh over 100 pounds. On the black market, that weight has a price.
Tim’s tusks weighed over 100 pounds each. He died of natural causes. That is not the story for most.
The demand does not come from poverty. It comes from status, from ornament, from the belief that beauty extracted is worth more than beauty alive.
Every print I sell argues the opposite.
field notes
The Elephant
22-month pregnancy
See only red & green
Eat 18 hours daily
Up to 13,000 lbs
Live 70 years
Breed at 14
Touch to communicate
40,000 trunk muscles
Trumpet heard 6 miles
Hear vibrations through feet
