Developing Animals: Wildlife and Early American Photography

Chapter 4: The Appearance of Animals: Abbott Thayer, Theodore Roosevelt, and Concealing-Coloration

135 Nineteenth-century animal photography was characterized by the attempt to make animals visible. This effort can be seen in the development of photographic technology by Eadweard Muybridge , Étienne-Jules Marey, and Ottomar Anschütz to capture mobile animal bodies; the adaptation of hunting techniques to make uncooperative animal bodies photographable; and the development of the photographic blind. These practices and events all contributed to making animals visible and photo­ graphable. For example, as was discussed in the previous chapter, the photographic blind was used to make animals fully available to sight. In the rhetoric of the blind, seeing more of animals equaled knowing more about them. The blind thus presupposed that animals’ relation to visuality was such that to appear was to be knowable. Yet, as Jonathan Burt cautions,“It is important not to conflate the scientific project of knowing more about animals with the visual project of seeing more.”1 Seeing more of animals is not necessarily the same as knowing more about them. Burt’s caution raises the chapter 4 The Appearance of Animals: Abbott Thayer, Theodore Roosevelt, and Concealing-Coloration The Appearance of Animals T h e App e a r a n c e o f A n i m a l s 136 question of whether photography’s emphasis on the visibility of the animal, its stress on making the animal appear, can obscure the animal’s visual relation to the world.This question of the separability of visibility and knowledge is at the heart of the American painter Abbott Thayer’s work on concealing-coloration in animals. In this chapter I examine the role of photography in Thayer’s work on animal coloration.Thayer used photography to examine the visuality of animals—the visual relation of animal appearance to the world. Thayer’s work on animal coloration sparked considerable scientific debate.2 His theory that all animal appearance was protective was rigorously challenged, most notably by Theodore Roosevelt. Reading the scientific debate illuminates the changing understanding of animal photography at the turn of the century and clarifies the limitations of Thayer’s theories of animal coloration. The photographs Thayer used are unusual in that they do not strive to maximize the visibility of their subjects. Instead, the animals photographed tend toward imperceptibility, and the images toward unreadability. The photographs open up the question of animal visuality and hence the relation of animals to photography. The images go against photography’s bias toward visibility and in so doing reveal the extent to which that bias constrains animal photography. They thus help illuminate the limits of animal photography by showing how its operations need to be articulated through the visible. I argue that the photographs in Thayer’s natural history work mark a separation within photography between the visual project of seeing animals and the scientific project of knowing animals. Thayer, Photography, and Countershading Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849–1921) was one of the most significant painters of late-nineteenth-century America.3 Born in Boston, he grew up in the New England countryside. He trained as an artist in Boston and started his artistic career in 1867 as an animalier painting pet portraits in Brooklyn. In the late 1870s he studied in T h e App e a r a n c e o f A n i m a l s 137 Paris under the Academic painter Jean Léon Gérôme (1824–1904). After his return to America in 1879, Thayer became nationally known for his paintings of angelic women and children and was elected president of the Society of American Artists in 1883. In the early 1890s Thayer began to focus on the function of animal coloration.4 An avid collector of bird skins since childhood , Thayer began investigating the patterns of their markings. In his investigations, Thayer began to explore whether bird coloration was functional rather than simply decorative. He argued that bird markings evolved through natural selection to respond to the bird’s environment. Thayer took a bird’s appearance as a representation of the species’ evolutionary environment that protected the bird from predation by obscuring it from view. In 1896, Thayer published a series of animal photographs in the journal of the American Ornithological Association, The Auk.5 The photographs accompanied Thayer’s article “The Law Which Underlies Protective Coloration.”The series of photographs documented Thayer’s experiments positioning taxidermic objects in nature to demonstrate his...