HELD - Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary, Ubud by Kaz FernandezHELD - Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary, Ubud by Kaz Fernandez

HELD - Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary, Ubud

Kaz Fernandez

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HELD | Mandala Suci Wenara Wana, Bali

21 selected frames. One story. Full sequence, colour grade and metadata.

The story is anchored to the place; Mandala Suci Wenara Wana, its five families, its three temples, its one governing idea, and structured as the walk itself:

Expected → seen → lived → learnt → revealed → leaving.

Some Facts

Ten hectares. Five families. Over a thousand macaques, three temples, and one Balinese idea about harmony holding it together. I went into Mandala Suci Wenara Wana to photograph animals. Almost every frame I kept has two of them touching. Field Value Balinese name Mandala Suci Wenara Wana English name Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary, Padangtegal, Ubud.

Size 10 hectares (25 acres)

Residents 1,260

Balinese long tailed macaques (2023)

The sanctuary's own site currently says 1,054, write "over a thousand" and you're right either way.

Social structure Five distinct troops, each holding its own territory Trees At least 115 species.

Temples inside Pura Dalem Agung Padangtegal (main) · Pura Beji (holy spring / bathing temple) · Pura Prajapati (cremation temple) Governing philosophy Tri Hita Karana.

"Harmony between people, between people and nature, between people and the divine"

The story

HELD - Mandala Suci Wenara Wana · Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary · Padangtegal, Ubud

I went in to photograph monkeys. Almost every frame I kept has two of them touching.

What I expected: at the gate.

A tourist attraction. A queue, a ticket, a photo op with something wearing a hat. Ten hectares of content and two hours to shoot it.

I was wrong about all of it before I got twenty metres in.

What I saw: the forest floor

You don't enter this place. You interrupt it.

A hundred and fifteen species of tree close over the path and drop the temperature a few degrees. Somebody is asleep across the stones. Somebody is being groomed. A mother is feeding.

Nothing stops. Nobody looks up.

Five families live in here, each holding its own ground, and you are not on the list. That isn't a problem. That's the gift.

What I lived, sitting down

The first hour is wasted. You arrive, and you chase; backs, blurs, a tail leaving the frame.

Then you sit on a wall and stop being interesting, and the forest closes over the top of you and carries on.

The photograph starts the moment you stop being the reason anything is happening.

We are the background, the temple steps

One of them walked straight up to my lens and looked at it the way you'd look at a stone.

Another was sitting on a temple tap, completely at home in a building people made, using it better than we do.

In every frame here with a human in it, the human is small, blurred, or walking away.

That's the correct order, and I didn't have to arrange it.

What it revealed: the mossy wall by the water

An infant tucked under an arm, barely visible until you look twice.

A newborn held between two adults, handled like something that might come apart.

And one baby with enormous eyes staring straight down the lens from inside a wall of bodies, three adults around it, not one of them looking at me, all of them between it and the world.

That's the whole species in a single frame. Probably ours too.

What it taught me: the tending, and the light

What they actually do all day is groom each other. That's it. That's the day. One lies down and gives up completely, belly to the sky, arm out, eyes shut, while two others work through its fur with total concentration. Nobody hurries. Nobody checks whether it's being repaid.

I've photographed a lot of people trying to look close to each other. This is what close actually looks like, and it isn't romantic. It's maintenance. Hours of it.

Sleep is the proof. A body face down on a brick path in the middle of the afternoon, arm thrown out, gone, with strangers walking past two metres away. You only sleep like that where you are safe. That frame says more about this place than any wide shot of the forest could.

And the light gives you almost nothing. Green, filtered, moving, gone in seconds. So you don't light anything, you find the one bright patch and wait for a body to move into it. Most of these frames are exactly that. It isn't luck; most days it's the only decision worth making.

I left the shadows black. One shoulder, one hand, one small face carrying the light. Lift the shadows, and you get information. Leave them alone, and you get a feeling.

Leaving the wooden path

The last frame is the only one where somebody is alone and awake.

Flat out on the boards, chin on the wood, everything switched off except the eyes, and the eyes are on me. Not frightened. Not curious. Just tired, and completely unbothered that I was there.

That's the closest thing to permission I got all afternoon.

This forest runs on a Balinese principle called Tri Hita Karana, harmony between people, between people and nature, and between people and the divine. I didn't know that when I walked in.

I understood it by the time I walked out.

How you translate a feeling into a frame

A feeling is not a mood you add in the grade. It's a decision you make before the shutter.

The same eight decisions work on a wedding, a restaurant, a factory floor or a boardroom.

What it taught me about photographing people

You cannot pose any of this.

You can't ask for a hand on a shoulder, or a body that trusts enough to lie down, or a face that forgets the camera is there. You can only be quiet, stay long enough, and be ready before it happens.

That's the same muscle behind a portrait that looks like a person instead of a headshot. A restaurant that looks alive instead of styled. A family that looks like a family instead of an arrangement.

The forest just won't let you fake it.