Pursuit Is Ended Here
Having either mounted a 600 mm super-telephoto lens to his Rolleiflex or crept up really close, Derek Chatwood has an intriguing quartet of black-and-white, medium-format animal portraits shot on film at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo. The Komodo dragon photograph above is accompanied by two of a gorilla and one of a leopard, both animals similarly in some form of repose.
The Komodo dragon, at least, needn’t do much more than wait. He’ll get you, eventually.
…Pursuit
is ended here, leaving me in the gallery forest
leaving me in the leaves already fallen,
leaving me to the sere clash of the palms that quiver in my head.
I shall stare, I know, into black obsidian forever…
The drums will sound once more in the sullen mountains;
the huge upreared white serpent will hold me close ensorcelled
as eye to eye with him I forget
how the beautiful rider passed
wherever it was she passed me
and how it was I searched before sleep found me
the seeker and the sought in that ophidian eyeball fading
into a night so black there could be no regret.
– Loren Eiseley, from “The White Python,” Notes of An Alchemist, New York: Scribner (1972).