The Giraffe Looks Back

Maasai Mara, Kenya · nature

A Maasai giraffe looks straight at the camera, its dark eyes ringed with lashes that would not be out of place in a perfume ad. Mara branches soften the background.

Giraffes are extraordinary at very close range. Their faces are large enough to fill a frame without any apparent effort, and they wear an expression that is somehow both alert and slightly amused — as though the world below them, including the safari vehicle, was a slow comedy they had seen many times before. The eyelashes do the rest. Up close, they look ridiculous; they look almost staged.

This one had walked over to a flat-topped acacia to browse the upper branches and had stopped at maybe fifteen metres from us. The neck moved slowly side to side as he chewed, but the head kept turning back to fix us in one eye and then the other, with the unhurried curiosity of an animal that has nothing to fear from anything on the ground. I shot tight, with just the head and the upper neck in frame, and the background dropping away into the pale colours of the dry-season bush. Some safari pictures are about the chase. This one is about being still long enough for the animal to decide we were not a problem.

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