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Preface
- University of Minnesota Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
vii When I began this project in the fall of 1998 at the University of Rochester, I was often asked why I wanted to study animals. The topic struck some of my instructors and fellow students as a strange obsession, as the stakes of an inquiry into the representation of animals were not immediately obvious. In fact, the graduate program director at the time took me aside during my second year and suggested that it might be better for my academic development if I spent a semester not writing about animals.The problem was that animals did not figure as a topic in the humanities and social sciences then; animal studies was not yet a recognized area of research and publishing and was only beginning to be discussed as a possible term to describe the scholarship of individuals scattered across a number of disciplines.The animalthemed conferences I attended in 2000 and 2002 were marked by a palpable sense of relief among the participants at not having to begin the discussion by justifying the scholarly significance of animals.1 Since then, the question of animals has arisen with parpreface Preface P r e f a c e viii ticular force and has been increasingly central to conversations around the posthumanities.2 This project had its conceptual beginning in a footnote to a paper I published in 1998 on the Canadian wildlife painter Robert Bateman. “Robert Bateman’s Natural Worlds” analyzed the visual economy of Bateman’s images, arguing that their close-ups of animals in nature left no space for the viewer to occupy.3 The vantage point of the images situated the viewer in proximity to the animals depicted and implied that the viewer was present with the animals in nature; at the same time, the behavior of the animals, their nonreaction to the viewer’s proximity, denied the viewer’s presence. In a footnote, I compared this erasure of human presence from the image to the photo blinds shown at the beginnings of the wildlife films I saw in school in order to authenticate the images of animal behavior that followed. I wrote the paper on Bateman in part to try and think through the hostility toward him that was (and still is) prevalent in the Canadian art world. Liking Bateman was seen as evidence of Philistinism , and disparaging him was a marker of allegiance to serious art. His well-painted images of wild animals, which he used to raise awareness of environmental issues, were anathema to anyone with pretensions to an artistic sensibility.4 His popularity was taken as evidence of the vulgarity of mass taste. His animals were seen as a cheap and sentimental subject addressed to petit bourgeois sensibilities on par with Thomas Kinkade’s nostalgic fantasies.5 This dynamic played out on a smaller scale in a philosophy of art class I took as an undergraduate.The class decided as a group to use Bateman as our counterexample to test the theories of art we were exploring. We were certain Bateman was not art and applied this certainty to test the theories; if a theory couldn’t distinguish between wildlife painting and art, then it was flawed. My paper thus had an undercurrent of exploring the question of animal representation that I had not been able to explicitly formulate. [44.201.131.213] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:52 GMT) P r e f a c e ix Developing Animals: Wildlife and Early American Photography formally began when, for Douglas Crimp’s introductory methods class in visual culture studies at Rochester, I started to trace the origins of the photographic blind. Investigating the origins and function of the blind led me to the strangeness of nineteenthcentury animal photography and the practice of camera hunting . This work formed the core of my dissertation in visual and cultural studies, supervised by Lisa Cartwright and Paul Duro. I developed key pieces of the project working with Joan Shelley Rubin at Rochester and Margaretta Lovell at University of California, Berkeley.After much revision and important feedback from my writing group and outside readers, that dissertation has become this book. The project has broader roots than simply exploring the implications of a footnote. It is grounded in my own history of engagement with animals. I spent my summers during my undergraduate years planting trees in Northern Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia. The job involved reforesting clear-cuts with saplings and a shovel, and it brought me and my...