In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and particularly
since the Endangered Species Act, discourse in the United
States about species extinction and conservation has been mediated by
photography and film. Through these media, rare or distant animal species that most
of us will never see in the wild, including charismatic mega-fauna like
elephants, lions and polar bears, have become more accessible and more familiar
than local and common species (since most Americans don’t go bird watching or
hunting). We often assume that our access to photographic images does no harm
to the animals pictured or their habitat. This is false, I fear. But in the
nineteenth century, lacking photography, demand of collectors for eggs and
skins of the Great Auk, for example, led directly to the extinction of the
species in1844, when the last known birds were killed on a sea stack in Iceland.
And of course today several mega-fauna species such as rhinos and tigers are
threatened by poachers who hunt them for their treasured commodities.
John James Audubon worked in paintings and engravings, and
produced the 435 plates of Birds of
America between 1827 and 1838, just prior to the development of the
daguerreotype and the popularization of portrait photography in the 1840s. I think
Audubon did as much as anyone to influence the modern aesthetics (and ethics)
of wildlife photography. Audubon was a genius at self-promotion, and he sensed
that the market would pay for high-quality images of birds and quadrupeds that
conveyed life and immediacy, and that promoted a nationalist species identity
of Birds of (the United States of) America. As he put it in “My Style of
Drawing Birds” he was driven by “enthusiastic desires to represent nature...to
copy her in her own way, alive and moving.”
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| Errol Fuller's 2014 book |
British
painter and naturalist Errol Fuller in his 2014 Lost Animals: Extinction and the Photographic Record reprinted
photographs of 28 now-extinct animals, 21 of them birds. He writes that was
inspired to undertake the project because of the response to his earlier
picture book Extinct Birds. Readers
said that photographs of these birds made a more powerful impression on them
than drawings or paintings. And so the Amazon blurb to the later book begins: “A
photograph of an extinct animal evokes a greater feeling of loss than any
painting ever could.” Why
does he (or the publisher) make this claim? Is it because viewers wish to know
what these birds looked like, or because they wish to mourn their demise?
Consider one of the best known extinct birds that Audubon painted the ivory-billed woodpecker. Compare the photograph, taken years ago, to Audubon’s painting. Which provides a better record of the extinct species? Which is more alive and moving?
The scandal of Audubon today, the source of continuing
anguish to the Audubon Society and other bird conservationists, is that he was
a hunter whose means of producing the species’ images was to kill the
specimens. Audubon in his writings frequently reminded his audience of his
labor to find and kill dozens, even hundreds of birds of each species in order
to obtain models for his artistic productions. He also wrote that he began
drawing birds as a child, and his father “constantly impressed upon me that
nothing in the world possessing life and animation was easy to imitate, and
that as I grew older he hoped I would become more and more alive to this.” He
developed his techniques prior to photography and unaware of the most reliable
methods of taxidermy devised by Jean-Baptiste Bécoeur and Louis Dufresne in
Paris around 1800. Nonetheless his goal was to “represent nature...in her own
way, alive and moving!” The “constitution of my manner of drawing birds, formed
upon natural principles” relied on field observations as well as multiple
sketches of dead specimens. “knowledge of the forms and habits of the birds of
our country impressed me with the idea that each part of a family must possess
a certain degree of affinity, distinguishable at sight in any one of them.”
Audubon sought to create an avian taxonomy based not simply on the visible,
static structural features that formed the basis of the Linnaean system, but on
movement and behavior. This is what he portrayed in images that show birds
eating, preening, hunting, feeding chicks and incubating eggs.
Hence in the juxtaposition of photos and paintings, we find a
paradox. Audubon’s images of birds, drawn from dead specimens, give us color,
movement, and sensations of living immediacy. Photographs of the same species of
birds, living in their natural habitat, as Errol Fuller reported, evoke death,
loss, and mourning. Leading theorists of photography promote this idea. John
Berger insists that photographs of animals convey humans’ alienation, distance
from, and invisibility to the animals pictured. The black-and-white photographs
of the ivory-bill woodpecker and passenger pigeon are poor because limited by
the equipment of the time and of the birders who took them, but many birders
prefer guidebooks illustrated with paintings over those with photographs, and
for John Berger advanced photographic
techniques only exacerbate the problem: “the devices used to obtain ever more
arresting images—hidden cameras, telescopic lenses, flashlights, remote
controls and so on—combine to produce pictures which carry with them numerous
indications of their normal invisibility.” In Berger’s Marxist modern industrial technology has reduced both
humans and animals to “isolated productive and consuming units” and neither
speech nor sight can bridge the gap between animal and human. (“Why
Look at Animals? p. 14, 16)
Roland Barthes’ Camera
Lucida also suggests that photography depicts death, even when not of a
since-extinct species:
…en
attestant que l’objet a été réel, elle induit subrepticement à croire qu’il est
vivant, à cause de ce leurre qui nous fait attribuer au Réel une valeur
absolument supérieure, comme éternelle ; may en déportant ce réel vers le
passé (« ça a été »), elle suggère qu’il est déjà mort (La Chambre Claire 124)
...by attesting that the object has been
real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because
of that delusion that makes us attribute to Reality an absolutely superior,
somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past (“this-has-been”),
the photograph suggests that it is already dead (Camera Lucida 79).
For Barthes photographs induce “a perverse confusion between two
concepts: the Real and the Live” what was real is no longer alive, what was
moving is now deadly still. Barthes’ existential melancholia, post-structuralist
cynicism, poor health, and mourning for his mother Henriette seem antithetical
to Audubon’s exuberant determination and entrepreneurial self-promotion. But
Audubon also participated in the necrophilia that contributed to the culture of
19th century photography. To build his career as an artist in
Kentucky in the 1810s he did portraits, and recalls:
I was sent for four miles in the country, to
take likenesses of persons on their death-beds, and so high did my reputation
suddenly rise, as the best delineator of heads in that vicinity, that a
clergyman residing at Louisville...had his dead child disinterred, to procure a
fac-simile of his face, which, by the way, I gave to the parents as if still
alive, to their intense satisfaction. (“Myself”)
Audubon proved to the clergyman his powers to bring the dead to
life, humans as for birds.
The relation of time to image deepens the paradoxical contrast between
paintings and photographs. Barthes wrote:
En me
donnant le passé absolu de la pose (aoriste), la photographie me dit la mort au
futur….Que le sujet soit déjà mort ou non, toute photographie est cette
catastrophe. (150)
By
giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death
in the future....Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph
is this catastrophe. (96)
Camera
Lucida
emphasizes journalistic, art and portrait photography; the animals in these
photos are incidental. But many lines in the book, including these, suit
wildlife, and have been so applied by animal studies scholars like Matthew
Brewer in Developing Animals and Akira
Mizuta Lippet in Electric Animals. Lippet
draws upon Barthes and André Bazin to assert: “The photographic look exhibits
an attention without perception, a type of being without subjectivity. On this
view animals are, in essence, like photographs” (176).
In Audubon’s bird portraits the posed subject was a dead
bird, often a putrid, decaying bird whose colorful plumage had already faded. In
contrast to Barthes’ “absolute past of the pose” a past moment of life that
foretells death, Audubon’s pictures brought the dead back to life, reversed the
processes of death and decay to portray the most energetic dynamism. The
daguerreotype method used until his death in 1851 required subjects to pose
motionless, from several seconds to up to a minute, whereas Audubon portrayed
some of the fastest moving things of his world, such as falcons, swifts and
hummingbirds.
American birds had been luxury art products since before Columbus.
Feathers were among the primary commodities of colonial Brazil, and plumed
skirts and headdresses became an iconic symbol of the place. In the Natural and Moral History of the Indies of
1590 José de Acosta wrote of how Aztec artists produced art using the colors of
ground bird feathers. Audubon sold images of birds as a luxury product, for his elephant
folio sold at very high prices. Ironically, the perfection of lithography,
during the same period that Audubon published his Birds of America, would soon enable cheaper color illustrations,
and facilitate mass-market publishing of natural history books.
