Aesthetics, Agency and Technology in John James Audubon's "Bird of America"

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.”

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 19^th 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.  “Time is ever precious to the student of nature.” Audubon also wrote (in “The Florida Keys I”). Because the best taxidermy techniques were not available to Audubon, producing his paintings required him to shoot thousands of birds. He learned to pose dead birds as he wished by using wires and blocks of wood, and he had to work quickly, limited by daylight and often by accelerated decay in tropical climates. To complete a painting, and to sketch male and female and juvenile birds, required shooting even more specimens. The hunters who accompanied him were happy to help, and carnage frequently resulted.

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.

the shift from painting to photography, or from unique images to reproductions, went alongside a shift from a general idea that species are super-abundant, as with Audubon’s passenger pigeon biography, to the modern notion that the species we value are those that are rare or endangered. We obsess over “celebrity” animal species, and occasionally individual celebrities like Cecil the Lion, fragile, gorgeous, and repeatedly photographed. We view with contempt many species that are invasive, weedy, non-native or overabundant. A few species including the passenger pigeon, have passed from one group to the other since Audubon’s time. So the value we place upon a species is often a function of its rarity, and this phenomenon has developed alongside the proliferation of photographic and film images of animals. What is the relationship between the two?