Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Cape Town Museum, including the head of a white rhinoceros shot by Selous in
Mashonaland in 1880 (Bryden 1893:491-492). Significantly, nearly all of the
photographs of animals reproduced in Bryden's topic were of stuffed ones. Stuffed
animals had become the ideal photographic target: a re-creation of nature as
apparently authentic, yet utterly docile. Photographs of stuffed animals such as that
in Dawnay's album (see
Figure 10.1
) thus represent a kind of double mimesis, and
reinforce the shared ways in which photography and taxidermy are manifestations
of a desire to possess and control nature (Hauser 1998).
Photographing wildlife
Photographs of stuffed animals were made in part for the practical reason that until
the 1880s photographing animals 'in the wild' remained difficult. The easiest means
of securing photographs of living, wild animals, though perhaps the least intrepid, was
at London's Zoological Gardens; and a number of commercial photographers
followed this route in the 1860s and 1870s (Haes 1865; York 1872). Photographing
animals in the wild, as opposed to in captivity in zoos or as stuffed exhibits in
museums, was made easier by the technical developments of the 1880s and 1890s:
notably, the use of new roll film, the increasing portability of cameras, the reduction
in exposure times, and the development of telephotographic lenses. Contemporary
advertisements for cameras, telephotographic lenses and telescopes, such as those
produced by the London-based firm of Dallmeyer, show the promotion of the use
of this technology in practices such as natural history, mountaineering and hunting
(see
Figure 10.2
). As technical developments in photography enabled a reduction in
the length of time necessary for an exposure, photographers and naturalists
elaborated their experiments with photography to record images of animals (Reid
1882). Eadweard J. Muybridge's photographic studies of animals in motion in the
late 1870s became particularly well known (Muybridge 1881). Such improvements
in technology were often themselves driven by the contemporary fascination for
capturing movement in nature. Thus the French physiologist Étienne Jules Marey
(1830-1904) turned to photography in the 1880s in his quest to capture movement
of animals in graphic form. In 1882 Marey developed a 'photographic gun' to follow
sea gulls in flight, which photographed as rapidly as 1/720th of a second (Didi-
Huberman 1987). That Marey should choose to house his rapid exposure camera
within the body of a gun is especially interesting, given that such photographic
advances also coincided with the improvement in hunting rifles and bullets, chiefly
through the development of cordite (1893). Hunting and photography; 'shots' and
'snapshots' thereafter embarked on an ever-closer association (Bennet 1914).
The use of photography in bringing mass audiences face to face with wild animals
from exotic places was closely associated with the widespread and
