Rain usually sweeps through South Luangwa National Park in the late afternoons of the wet season. This elephant keeps her two-month old calf from a soaking by providing moving shelter. There is a double scale incongruity here – the tiny calf is a miniature elephant compared to its huge mother, while this pair of animals is quite small compared to the landscape they occupy. The image is not just a study of maternal diligence. I am also commenting on the ecosystem of South Luangwa National Park itself. I’ve organized this photo as a series of symbolic layers – with the elephants as context in the foreground, the dead tree and a field of stumps in the middle ground, symbolizing the devastation caused by feeding elephants, and the leafy trees in the background, representing the trees that elephants have propagated by spreading seeds through their digestive tracts.