‘Hunting with the camera’ - Animal Spaces, Beastly Places - page 205

10
'Hunting with the camera'
Photography, wildlife and colonialism in Africa
James R.Ryan
Introduction
Visitors to the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery in Exeter, England,
are often particularly impressed by the life-size stuffed giraffe which takes a
prominent place in the centre of the displays of 'natural history'. What kinds of
historical processes and spatial practices were involved in the transformation of this
animal from eastern Africa to England and from living, wild animal into a lifeless,
domesticated, museum display of 'nature'? 1 As it turns out, this giraffe is one of a
number of large animals which were donated to the Museum in 1919 by the big-
game hunter Charles Victor Alexander Peel ( c. 1869-1931). A wealthy Englishman,
Peel pursued his 'sport'—from elephants to polar bears—as far afield as Somaliland
and the Outer Hebrides, recounting his exploits in a series of topics whose
photographs show the author posed with various hunting trophies (Peel 1900, 1901).
Most of Peel's big-game trophies, including the prize giraffe, were shot in Africa
between 1890 and 1910, and many found their way into public exhibitions of
'natural history'. 2 The giraffe—shot, preserved, stuffed and given the pet name
'Gerald'—acquired a prominent position within such displays of 'wildlife'. These
displays not only fabricated and domesticated the animals of distant colonial
territories within new public and private spaces 'back home', but served as
monuments to the big-game hunters who seemed to their contemporaries to wield
such mastery over the natural world.
This is a useful example with which to begin since the exploits of 'big-game'
hunters like Peel and the after-lives of the animals killed and collected are by no
means atypical of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Indeed, from the 1840s trophy
collections, along with illustrated topics, were essential in the making of profitable
reputations by hunters. Roualeyn Gordon Cumming, for example, author of the
highly popular and illustrated Five Years of a Hunter's Life (1850), returned to
England in 1849 with some thirty tons of trophies from Southern Africa. Cumming
exhibited the trophies in London for over two years (1850-2) and at the Great
Exhibition of 1851, later selling them to the famous showman Barnum for his
American Museum (Brander 1988:44-4-8). Hunting trophies, along with live
zoological specimens and exotic peoples (MacKenzie 1988:31; Schneider 1982:125-