Developing Animals: Wildlife and Early American Photography

Conclusion: Developing Animals

193 Since the announcement of photography in 1839, there have been an ever-increasing number of cameras pointed at animals in nature.The resulting photographs bear, in varying degrees, the traces of the animals in front of the lens and the humans behind them. The photographs produced by a camera pointed at an animal in nature are shaped by the social and technical context of the image’s production and circulation.This includes the immediate situation of animal and camera in nature, the broader social and cultural situation of the photographer, and the technological capabilities (and constraints) of the equipment. Simply put, cameras do not naturally produce wildlife photographs, nor, it should be stressed, any other kind of photographs. The regular production of any kind of image, which I call a practice of photography, requires a supporting social context. Focusing on American photographic practices, this book has explored what I see as the key moments in the discursive construction of animal photography. Contemporary photographs of animals in nature are largely Conclusion Developing Animals Conclusion C o n c l u s i o n 194 produced through the framework of wildlife photography that conceptually separates humans and animals. However, as the history of animal photography discussed in this book shows, wildlife photography is only one of the possible forms for the photography of animals in nature. The earliest animal photography operated differently and cannot be understood in terms of wildlife photography.Thus, in the 1840s and 1850s photographers produced a variety of images of animals that depicted animals as pets, transportation, and game. Those images from the time, like Llewelyn’s, which resemble wildlife photographs, operated according to different logics. In the 1870s and 1880s, Muybridge, Marey, and Anschütz developed new forms of photographic technology in order to capture images of animals. These developments helped make it technically feasible to photograph animals in nature. Photography of animals in nature emerged as a practice in the 1890s, when American photographers began hunting animals with their cameras. The camera hunters understood their photography as hunting, and their photographs as trophies.These claims for their practice made sense in the social and technical context of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America. However, as photographic technology continued to develop (making animal photography easier), as American attitudes to hunting changed (challenging sport hunting’s preeminence), and as the images began to circulate outside their original contexts (moving into scientific publications and general interest magazines), the “naturalness” of camera hunting broke down. In contrast, the understanding of animal photography that developed with the photographic blind has been more durable.Adapted to photography from a hunting technique, the photographic blind introduced a separation of human and animal into the practice of animal photography. The blind made animals visible at the price of conceptually erasing human-animal contact from the photographs. The resulting images of “deep” nature provided the framework for the development of the genre of wildlife photography.Yet not C o n c l u s i o n 195 all animal photographers sought to make animals visible; Abbott Thayer’s images sought to capture the relation between animal and environment in a way that did not privilege the human viewer. However, Thayer’s work failed to develop into a practice , in large part because his photographs of indistinct animals encountered fierce hostility from the American establishment. The history of animal photography Developing Animals has detailed is characterized, with the notable exception of Thayer, by an emphasis on making animals accessible to sight. This emphasis has continued through the expansion of camera-based animal images in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The twentieth century saw an explosion of animal images and the development of wildlife photography, film, and video.1 The late twentieth century saw the development of satellite TV channels devoted to various forms of wildlife representations, and the twenty-first century has seen the development of twenty-four-hour animal webcams. Photographs, and other camera-based media (film and video), have helped structure our understandings of animals and our understandings of the human.As Jonathan Burt suggests,“the position of the animal as a visual object is a key component in the structuring of human responses towards animals, particularly emotional responses.”2 Wildlife photographs construct their viewers as unnatural. That is to say, wildlife photographs frame our relation to nature in terms of authenticity and suggest that our presence...