Luke Rauby

Luke Rauby is a South African field guide and wildlife photographer whose eye was shaped long before he made a career of it. He grew up overlanding southern Africa with a family who lived for the bush, and it was on his mother's camera, somewhere between those camps, that the photography began. He spent the greater part of his guiding career at Kwandwe Private Game Reserve in the Eastern Cape, ground that holds one of the country's most elusive subjects: the Eastern Cape leopard, a cat few guides ever see and fewer still photograph. Rauby works in portraits. He builds an image around the finer details of an animal, and above all around the eyes, where he finds a animals whole story held in a single look. Having recently co-founded a safari company of his own, he now works across a wider range of reserves, sharing the places he knows with more people and returning from each with new work.