Eye on deer

The story behind the photo

A red deer stag lying in the tall grass at the foot of the birches in the forest of Rambouillet, head raised and turned towards me. The picture was made at the moment when he noticed I existed and decided it did not matter yet.

The composition is layered from front to back, and each layer is treated differently: out-of-focus grass in the foreground, the sharp mass of the animal in the middle, the pale vertical trunks behind, and a dark wood closing the depth. Shooting through the vegetation rather than around it was a deliberate choice. It restores the real conditions of the encounter, in which a resting stag is always partly hidden and the photographer is always slightly too low.

The light arrives in patches, filtered by the canopy; it falls on the grass and the top of the antlers and leaves the body in half-shade. Dappled light is difficult and unforgiving, because it moves and because it can cut an animal in two, but when it lands correctly it models a shape better than any open light.

What I remember is the eye contact, and the complete absence of panic in it. A resting stag that has seen you and does not get up is granting you something, and the point is to be worthy of it: stay low, stop moving, take fewer frames than you want to.

I wanted the print to hold that pact: an animal that knows, and stays.