Twenty days across Nepal, ending in the Chitwan forest. I have many photographs from that trip, and most of them are of the working elephants, the domesticated ones that carry tourists, their eyes half closed, tired. Those are the pictures I took.
The picture I did not take is the one I still see. We had just dismounted at the sanctuary when the wild male appeared out of the mist, between the trees. He was nothing like the tired animals around me, gigantic, tusked, the alpha of the few undomesticated elephants left in the area. A god walking out of the forest. I raised the camera and the battery was dead.
So the best image of the whole trip is the one that exists only in my head. The series is about that: the things we manage to capture are the tame ones, worn down, holding still. What is actually alive walks off before the shutter, and you are left having seen it, which is not the same as having it.
