Will Burrard-Lucas’s The Black Leopard begins with a precise encounter: reports in 2018 of a young black leopard in Kenya. Working with members of the local community, the wildlife photographer set out to record an animal seldom seen in Africa’s semiarid shrublands. The resulting images anchor a broader account of pursuit, patience, and the practical conditions under which intimate photographs of elusive wildlife become possible.

The book places this assignment within Burrard-Lucas’s longer history with East Africa. His interest in leopards reaches back to a childhood in Tanzania and developed into a photographic practice shaped as much by engineering as by observation. A remotely controlled camera buggy and a high-quality camera-trap system allowed him to approach animals indirectly and to photograph nocturnal activity without relying on conventional proximity. Here, technology is not presented as spectacle in itself, but as a means of extending what wildlife photography can witness.

The black leopard’s dark coat results from excess melanin; while melanistic leopards are found more often in Southeast Asia, they are exceptionally uncommon in the African landscape pictured here. Burrard-Lucas’s photographs show the animal moving through its territory at night, while images of lions and elephants widen the book beyond a single celebrated subject. The narrative likewise resists the fiction of the solitary adventurer: local knowledge and cooperation are integral to the project’s achievement.

Published by Chronicle Books in 2021, this 218-page volume combines wildlife photographs with an autobiographical account of their making. Its interest for a serious photobook collection lies in that conjunction. The Black Leopard documents not only a rarely observed animal, but also a contemporary working method in which fieldcraft, remote-camera design, personal history, and community collaboration meet. It is therefore valuable as both an animal portrait and a record of how photographic access is constructed.