Developing Animals: Wildlife and Early American Photography

Chapter 3: The Photographic Blind

83 Our aim has been to show the natural world in all its infinite variety , almost as if man were the one animal that did not exist in it. —Editors of Time-Life Books, Photographing Nature Wildlife Photography and the Photographic Blind In the introduction to the book Photographing Nature, the editors of Time-Life Books suggest that within the logic of the photographs of nature they present, “man is really just an offstage voice” (7). While he might be the “the inventor-operator of the image making apparatus,” they argue that man “is not in the picture itself, and does not belong there” (7). Instead, they aimed to present photographs that showed the world “almost as if man were the one animal that did not exist in it” (7). In their view, true nature photography presents a vision of the world empty of humans and their traces. This is the rhetoric of the wildlife photograph. chapter 3 The Photographic Blind The Photographic Blind T h e P h o t o g r a p h i c B l i n d 84 As the editors argue, “man” is not in the wildlife photograph and “does not belong there.” If there are humans in a photograph, we know it is not a wildlife photograph.Wildlife photography is a representational regime constituted by human absence. This is a radical exclusion. Not only does the infinite variety of the natural world not include humans, but the pure landscape of wildlife photography has no place for the backpacker or the scenic view. It seems that in nature photography, no matter how minimal the impact, or how respectful the occupation of the landscape, human beings do not belong. As was discussed in chapter 1, this conception of nature and humans as fundamentally separate is a redeployment of the Garden mythos, which envisions nature as pure and human beings as fallen and corrupting.Wildlife photography posits a vanishing nature corrupted by human traces that the photographer must work to overlook. Yet, as the editors’ argument also suggests, hiding or erasing human presence from photographic images is not easy, it takes work. As the German critic Walter Benjamin’s classic essay on the camera’s reconstruction of perception argues, creating photographic imagery with no trace of humanity requires special procedures .1 (Not least because the photographic image itself can imply the presence of the photographer through the photographic apparatus.) In other words, photographs without human traces do not occur naturally. They must be produced. For the representational regime of wildlife photography to function, human presence must be regularly effaced. The required erasure is both practical and conceptual. Humans and their traces must be physically erased from the images, and the images must be understood as unmarked by human presence. Wildlife photography thus depends on a double erasure of human presence from animal photography. The representational regime of wildlife photography, as articulated in such works as Photographing Nature, differs from the discursive regime of camera hunting presented in the previous T h e P h o t o g r a p h i c B l i n d 85 chapter. Camera hunting centered on the interaction between animal and human figured in the photograph; the images figured the trophy photographer’s conquest of the animal. In contrast, wildlife photography is predicated on the radical disjunction of humans and animals; animals are presented as occupying a separate realm of nature from which humans are fundamentally excluded.Thus, the change from camera hunting to wildlife photography has been marked by a change in the function of animal photography from asserting the presence of the photographer to denying it. I argue that the development of the photographic blind is central to understanding this transformation. In this chapter I trace the emergence of the photographic blind out of the hunting blind and the shift in its function from enabling the production of trophy images to producing images of wild animals. The Operation of the Photographic Blind The photographic blind is a key apparatus in the production of wildlife photography; the other is the telephoto lens. Photographic blinds allow photographers to take candid shots of wild animals in their natural habitat. However, the photographic blind, like the images it helps produce, has been naturalized. To borrow a term from science studies, the photographic blind has been black boxed. It is not presented as an achievement but...