Darth deer

The story behind the photo

One early autumn morning in the forest of Rambouillet, a stag stepped out of the mist and simply held still, as though it had decided to let itself be seen rather than heard first. Low sun caught its antlers and reduced its eyes to two small, sharp points of light against the dark trees behind it, giving the whole frame a slightly ominous, almost cinematic weight, which is where the title comes from.

I shot it in black and white, so that nothing but that stillness and that stare would carry the picture: no autumn colour to soften the encounter, just the animal, the light and the dark. The composition gives almost the whole frame to the dark. Nothing cuts across the stag, and the rest of the picture holds no information beyond a faint suggestion of trunks. In colour that emptiness would read as underexposure; in black and white it reads as space, and it gives the animal its weight.

I decided on the exposure at the moment of shooting, not afterwards: I set it for the lit edge of the antlers and the back and let everything below the shoulder fall away, leaving a line of light that draws the head, the antlers and the spine. The title came later, but the intention was already there: not the portrait of a stag, but a silhouette that looks back.