It looks like a freeze frame from a wild woman stare-off somewhere in the heart of Africa.
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But this stunning artwork by Lori Cicchini is actually composed of three very distinct Canberra elements.
The model is Canberra woman Anne Duffy, the cheetah is Zingula from our very own National Zoo and Aquarium, and the landscape is not a sloping plain in Namibia but a field out the back of Palmerston.
The image was one of eight portraits that helped land Cicchini two high-profile Australian Institute of Professional Photography (AIPP) titles for 2017: ACT Portrait Photographer of the Year and ACT Illustrative Photographer of the Year.
Cicchini said the artwork - entitled Beauty and the Beast - united three images in one, and took two locations and 12 hours to create.
"It had been a vision for a while, to create Beauty and the Beast, where the 'beast' was focused around the beast in humanity, women and in confrontation," Cicchini said.
"And the 'beauty' being nature and love in its raw form.
"I love that it has such a profound meaning behind it - for me, my work is rarely about the obvious, it digs deep into my psyche."
Born in Canberra and raised in Narrabundah (her Italian immigrant dad Emilio owned Cafe Roma at the Narrabundah shops in the 1960s), Cicchini was a public servant turned real estate agent when she made the fateful decision to buy a Canon 5D on the way home from an overseas trip in 2008.
She's never looked back.
Cicchini obtained a Bachelor of Photography from CIT in 2013 and just two years later was named the Fine Art Nude Photographer of the Year at the International Photography Awards.
Her winning series of nudes - entitled Human Nature and shot on Tasmania's Mariah Island - went on to grace the pages of Italian Vogue.
All this from an artist who was once "terrified" of putting people in her images.
"I struggled with photographing people at first," she admitted.
"I'd be like 'oh no, that's too hard'. I had a lack of confidence. I just thought 'I'm going to waste somebody's time by photographing them'."
Cicchini faced this fear head-on by staging a fashion shoot in Garema Place and allowing herself time on the day to "make mistakes".
"I discovered that the more mistakes I made, the more creative I became - I was thinking outside the square," she said.
"I can plan so much but in the end my best photos end up being the ones where I've made a mistake or it's been improvised or something's gone wrong and we've had to change something last minute.
"And then it ends up being - holy shit, wow."
Today Cicchini specialises in portrait photography for clients across Australia and the world. But her subjects don't walk away with just a "pretty picture" of themselves, she said.
"I want clients to look at their photos and think 'I'm not looking at and loving this photo because it's me, I'm looking at and loving this photo because it's actually a piece of art," Cicchini said.
"When people come to me with an idea, I'll ride with their idea but then I take them somewhere completely different and that's where they go 'wow, amazing'."
