Branches burrow

The story behind the photo

A red fox at Croissy-sur-Seine, sitting in the grass under a low roof of branches that closes over him like the mouth of an earth. The title says burrow and the composition means it: the leaves come down from the top of the frame, the ground rises from the bottom, and the animal occupies the narrow band of light left between them. Nothing else is sharp. A long lens has turned the foreground grass into a green haze the eye has to look through, which is exactly the experience of watching a fox: you are never given a clean view, only a gap.

The light is summer light filtered twice, once by the canopy and once by the grass, and it arrives green and without direction. It does nothing to flatter the coat, and that is the interesting part: this is not the flame-coloured fox of winter photographs but a duller, dustier animal, the one that actually lives in the woods behind the houses.

He knew I was there. Foxes on the edge of a town are not so much frightened as unimpressed. He held my eye for three or four seconds, decided I was neither food nor danger, and looked away.

I wanted the picture to keep that distance rather than close it: an animal at home, seen from outside his doorway, with every leaf that separates us deliberately left in the frame.