A lazy afternoon

The story behind the photo

A brown bear in the Pyrenees, sitting back on his haunches in the middle of the afternoon, forepaws folded over his belly like someone who has decided that nothing else is going to happen today. The horizontal frame keeps him close to the centre and lets the scrub close in on both sides, so the picture holds him the way the mountainside does: surrounded, unhurried, at home. A long lens and an open aperture reduce the vegetation to three or four greens and keep the sharpness where it belongs, in the eyes and along the muzzle. Everything else is mass and fur, and it should read as mass.

The light is the flat, generous light of an overcast mountain afternoon, the kind photographers complain about and bears clearly prefer. It falls from everywhere at once, so it sculpts nothing and exaggerates nothing, and it gives the coat its real colour instead of a golden version of it.

What stayed with me is how quickly awe turns into tenderness. You come for the emblem, for the power and the old fear that Europe never quite got over, and what you are given is a heavy, sleepy animal scratching his stomach and looking back at you with mild interest. I wanted the photograph to carry that reversal rather than the legend: not the emblem, just a bear at rest.