Developing Animals: Wildlife and Early American Photography

Chapter 2: Camera Hunting in America

25 Writing in 1900, the American critic James B. Carrington claimed that “as a test of skill in bagging game there is no comparison between the gun and the camera.”1 In other words, he argued that hunting animals with a camera was more difficult than hunting with a gun. To justify this claim, Carrington suggested that “to get a picture of some shy animal or bird calls for all the resources and knowledge of woodcraft that the best of sportsmen may command , and pits the intelligence of one against the other” (455). Animal photography was more difficult and demanding than gun hunting and thus a truer test of woodcraft. Carrington described animal photography as both a test of woodcraft and a means of bagging game. In doing so, he treated animal photography as a form of hunting. He claimed the camera was superior to the rifle, and the camera hunter to the rifle hunter. In making this comparison of camera and gun, Carrington was advocating the practice of camera hunting. chapter 2 Camera Hunting in America Camera Hunting in America C a m e r a H u n t i n g i n A m e r i c a 26 The American practice of camera hunting developed in the early 1890s. In camera hunting photographers attempted to capture images of birds and animals in their native haunts. They claimed that photographing animals in nature was hunting because photographing animals required all the skills of hunting. While the camera hunters promoted the camera as an alternative to the rifle, they stressed that choosing the camera did not mean abandoning hunting.2 Rather, they celebrated the camera as a superior instrument for hunting because of the greater degree of skill and prowess required for its use. For the camera hunters, the essence of hunting lay in the chase and not the kill. In thinking of their photography as hunting, the camera hunters saw their photographs as hunting trophies.The camera hunters circulated and displayed their images as hunting trophies; the photographs connected photographer and animal and stood as a monument to the photographer’s prowess. Although the rhetoric around these images focused almost entirely on what happened in the woods, the locus of camera hunting took place in sporting journals and general interest magazines. The practice depended on a confluence of American attitudes to nature, technological development, and gender identities. Once this balance shifted, camera hunting ceased to be taken literally, and it has since become difficult for us to see these images as hunting trophies. Camera hunting occupied the nexus of a number of issues engaging America at the end of the nineteenth century. It constructed an idealized relation to nature in the face of modernity and industrialization by integrating attitudes toward nature, animals , hunting, and masculinity in a period of intense technological change. To make sense of this phenomenon, it is necessary to closely consider the turn-of-the-century American camera hunter’s practice.This entails analyzing how photographers came to claim animal photography as hunting. In the camera hunters’ description of photography as hunting the term hunting does not operate in the ironic sense with which contemporary critics speak of a C a m e r a H u n t i n g i n A m e r i c a 27 camera safari.3 Given camera hunting’s distance from the contemporary understanding of animal photography (its apotheosis in the genre of wildlife photography), I situate camera hunting within its historical context in order to bring its operations into focus.4 The Development of Outdoor Animal Photography Unlike humans, animal subjects were not easily adjusted to nineteenth -century photography’s need for stasis. Humans adjusted themselves to the requirements of the technology by immobilizing themselves with clamps and braces. Although humans might be willing to wear a back brace in order to sit without moving for an extended period of time, animals—particularly wild animals— moved too much to be easily captured by the early camera. As photographic technology developed (and exposure times shortened ), animals began to more regularly appear in photographic representation, although, as was discussed in the previous chapter , most of the animals that appeared were dead, tame, or in zoos.5 The practice of camera hunting developed shortly after it became technologically feasible to regularly take photographs of unconfined live animals in nature. It began after...