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Photo-Op: The State of Nature

Years of patient stakeouts in the jungle have allowed David Gulden to capture photos of big cats in a state of nature. A photographic review of "The Centre Cannot Hold."

We've never really seen any of the big cats in the state of nature. They're usually on the move. Wildlife photography, which was kicked off by F.W. Champion's 1927 book, 'With a Camera in Tiger-land,' has long depended on trip-wires and camera traps or long shots from blinds. Extraordinary pictures have been taken by photographers like Valmik Thapar, Peter Beard and Steve Winter, but their lions and tigers are always in motion or, seemingly, tensed with suspicion of the human presence. And so David Gulden's 2006 photograph (above) of a mother leopard taking a 'late-morning nap' in Kenya's Itong Hills is a...

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