Evening roar

The story behind the photo

A red deer stag bellowing in the forest of Rambouillet, standing in the open among the trunks, head raised, mouth wide, his whole body engaged in producing a sound. He is not running and not fighting. He is announcing.

The composition is horizontal and deliberately gives him room on both sides, because a roaring stag needs the space he is claiming. The trunks around him are evenly spaced and slightly out of focus, so the forest becomes a colonnade rather than a thicket, and the animal stands in it as if placed within a piece of architecture.

The light is diffused by the canopy and comes mostly from above, so the back and the antlers are lit while the belly and the legs sink into the leaf litter. The ground is the ochre of early autumn, which dates the picture precisely: the rut runs for about three weeks in September and October, and nothing else in the year looks like it.

The sound is what stays with you. It is lower and more guttural than people expect, closer to a lion than to anything else in a European forest, and it travels through the ground as much as through the air. The first time you hear it at forty metres, you understand very clearly that you are a guest.

I wanted a photograph of an animal making a noise, and of a forest arranged around him as if it were listening.