Deer silhouette

The story behind the photo

A fallow deer on the crest of a dune in the Amsterdamse Waterleidingduinen, standing against a sky with no detail in it at all, seen across a foreground of grasses that the lens has dissolved into a soft band. The animal is small, centred and entirely outlined. Nothing else in the picture is fully resolved.

This is a photograph made through the landscape rather than of it. I chose a low position and a long focal length so that the nearest grasses would blur into a veil across the bottom of the frame, and the deer would seem to emerge from it. The eye reads the veil first, then the silhouette, and that order of reading is the whole effect.

The light is flat and white, a high sea fog over the dunes that removes every shadow and every horizon. In those conditions a landscape loses its depth and becomes a set of superimposed planes, pale on pale, and only a shape can hold the picture together.

These dunes filter drinking water for Amsterdam and are closed to dogs and cars, which is why the deer there behave in a way they seldom do elsewhere. They look at you. They wait. They decide when to leave.

I wanted a print that is almost empty and almost monochrome, with one animal standing exactly where the eye needs it.