Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
nineteenth century, most especially within the language and practices of Victorian
and Edwardian big-game hunting.
From the late 1850s, explorers, soldiers, administrators and professional hunters
began to employ the camera to record images of animals, skins and horns for
purposes of scientific documentation and as evidence of their hunting achievements.
For many hunters, photography, alongside the related practice of taxidermy, was a
convenient means of recording hunting trophies for lectures, books and personal,
private collections. Well-to-do Victorian hunters such as Guy C.Dawnay, who
undertook hunting and exploring expeditions in East and South Africa in the 1870s
and 1880s, compiled photographs of hunting trophies, friends and landscapes into
albums as mementoes of colonial adventures (Anon. 1889; Dawnay
c.
1880). Such
photographs of white men with dead animals or antlers, tusks and skins are a
common, even clichéd, feature of the repertoire of Victorian and Edwardian colonial
photography, and they testify further to the significance of hunting as a ritualistic
display of power by white colonial elites over land, subject peoples and nature.
Hunters did not only make photographs of themselves with animals they had shot.
Another photograph of 1876 in an album of Guy C. Dawnay shows nine preserved
lion heads set up on an easel (see
Figure 10.1
). The photograph presents a
disturbing display of dismembered heads, preserved as if part of live, wild animals.
Although the dismembered and isolated aspect of the lions' heads quickly shatters
any illusion of naturalism, the heads have nevertheless been given expressions of
snarling ferocity appropriate to such 'wild' animals. Here photography re-presents
the art of the taxidermist; capturing the spirit of the animal as alive and as a hunter
might encounter it. Indeed, photography and taxidermy shared the power to
fabricate nature in new spaces; to capture animals in their supposedly natural
attitudes and display their form to audiences eager for glimpses of exotic wildness
and knowledge of natural history.
While photography would eventually supersede taxidermy as an efficient and
economical means of arresting time and capturing the surface appearance of animals,
as modes of representation the two practices are closely related (Hauser 1998). Early
photographers employed taxidermy in order to capture portraits of animals in a
seemingly live pose and outdoor setting. In the 1850s J.D.Llewellyn took
photographs of stuffed deer, badgers, otters, rabbits and pheasants posed as if
photographed in the wild. Just as photographers drew on the skill of the taxidermist
to overcome their cameras' technical shortcomings, taxidermists drew in
