Developing Animals: Wildlife and Early American Photography

Chapter 1: A Red Herring: The Animal Body, Representation, and Historicity

1 A Read Heron The Photographic Exchange Club of London’s Photographic Album of 1857 contained a photograph of a heron titled Piscator No. 2 (Figure 1). The photograph was accompanied by an epigram that read,“And in the weedy moat, the heron fond of solitude alighted. The moping heron motionless and stiff, that on a stone as silently and stilly stood, an apparent sentinel, as if to guard the waterlily .”1 John Dillwyn Llewelyn (1810–82) took the photograph in 1856. Llewelyn, a cousin of photographic inventorWilliam Henry Fox Talbot, was a pioneering Welsh photographer.2 He specialized in images of nature taken from around his family’s estate, Penllergare.3 The image is a rectangle taller than it is wide (24.2 × 18.9 cm). At first glance, to a contemporary viewer the image appears to be of a common type; it reads as a genre photograph—specifically, a nature, or wildlife, photograph.As such, it appears to be immediately legible, presenting us with an image of deep nature: a wild chapter 1 A Red Herring: The Animal Body, Representation, and Historicity A Red Herring Figure 1. John Dillwyn Llewelyn, Piscator No. 2, 1856. City and County of Swansea, Swansea Museum Collection. A R e d H e r r i n g 3 animal in its natural environment. It depicts a heron standing in a pool of water in front of a rock wall. The heron is centered about one-third of the way up in the image.The heron’s reflection extends below it on the water almost to the edge of the image. The water is dark, almost black, and fills the bottom left quadrant of the image; against it the bright white of the heron stands out in marked contrast. Behind and above the heron is a rock wall covered in vines.The wall forms a dark mass occupying the upper left-hand quadrant of the image. The mass of the wall combined with that of the water create a dark vertical rectangle occupying the left side of the image. The right side of the photograph is a lighter band of gray composed of two separate elements. In the upper right corner the light illuminates a bulge in the rock wall. In the right foreground the light illuminates a grassy bank topped by a mound of stones. The bank in the foreground situates the viewer and provides an entry point to the image by giving a sense of scale and distance with which to read the image. By contrast, the overgrowth along the back wall suggests a space of human absence.The heron falls on the nonhuman side of this divide. There is a large clump of bulrushes directly behind the mound of stones. The bulrushes are echoed on the other side of the pool by another clump of rushes, which together frame the heron. This framing provides a strong diagonal line to the composition . The sharp contrast of the heron with its background, its compositional framing by the other elements of the image, its central positioning in combination with the image’s title (piscator meaning “fisher”), and the attached epigram from Thomas Hood suggest that the image is focused on the heron. The structure of the image announces that the heron is its center (subject); this is a photograph of a heron. Like any wildlife photograph, the image has a timeless quality that makes it appear contemporary.4 There are no markers within the image restricting it to a particular historical period. A R e d H e r r i n g 4 The heron, the rocks, and the rushes are not marked by historical traces.Within the visual rhetoric of the wildlife photograph there is no meaningful difference between a contemporary heron and one from 1856. By this I mean that while the image is labeled with a particular date, as a wildlife photograph the elements it presents are not determined by that date.Although the image of the heron was taken in 1856, the meaning of the heron as it appears to us is not confined to that historical moment. What I am suggesting is that wildlife photography operates within a rhetoric in which nature as nonhuman is ahistorical. Estelle Jussim and Elizabeth Lindquist-Cock argue that “the inclusion of a human figure, clothed in the appropriate fashions of the day and season, removes the photograph of Nature...