Someone to Look Up To

Taken in Nyerere National Park, Tanzania, in July 2023. There's no dramatic backstory to this image, no long wait or chase, just a quiet moment between a baboon mother and her baby that stopped me because of exactly what it looks like: the baby gazing up at her, reaching toward her, with what reads as something close to pure admiration.

It's easy to underestimate baboons, but watching the bond within a troop up close, you see the same things you'd recognise in any family: protection, learning, looking up to the people who raised you, quite literally in this case. To me, this photograph is about that: a mother who is, in every sense that matters to her baby, the centre of the whole world. Whatever she does, wherever she goes, that's who this baby wants to be.