The Photographic Blind as a Technology of Animal Representation

The Blind

Edited by Alfredo Cramerotti

With Text by Matthew Brower and Peter Nowogrodzki and Images by Renhui Zhao

128 pages | 50 color plates | 9 x 9

Available from the University of Chicago Press

Full Text

The Photographic Blind as a Technology of Animal Representation

The photographic blind is a technology for producing visual representations of animals that emerged at the end of the 19th century and was formalized in the early 20th century. This paper traces the development of the photographic blind from its origins in the hunting blind to its widespread adoption as a machine for producing candid images of animals in nature. Drawing on approaches from visual culture and animal studies, the paper reveals how the photographic blind is tied to the emergence of wildlife photography as a practice and genre of photography. It argues that the architecture of the blind structures the images it enables and thereby comes to shape human-animal relations. Understanding the mechanics of the blind helps clarify the importance of photography to contemporary understandings of animals and nature.

Live Animals in Nature as a Photographic Problem

Early photographic processes required long exposure times and were thus unsuited to photographing live animals in nature. Simply put, animals moved too unpredictably and erratically to be reliably photographed before the development of snapshot technology in the 1880s. While some photographers had success photographing live animals beginning in the 1840s, the vast majority of animal subjects photographed in the 1840s and 50s were dead.[1] Photographic technology developed rapidly over the course of the 19th century and the desire to photograph animals was behind some of the most significant advances. As Jonathan Burt reminds us, the desire to photograph animals was integral to the development of photographic technology. “Rather than simply being a suitable subject for photography, the animal presented technical and conceptual problems whose solution helped advance the technology of film making.”[2] Thus, Eadweard Muybridge’s 1870s experiments photographing the horse in motion advanced shutter technology and produced faster film emulsions.[3] Jules Etienne Marey’s 1880s experiments capturing animals in motion produced the photographic gun and innovations in celluloid film technology.[4] Ottomar Anschütz’s experiments with shutter technology in the 1880s allowed him to capture storks in flight in 1884 and he patented the focal-plane shutter in 1888.[5] While there were successful photographs of live animals in nature in the 1860s and 70s, it was not until the 1880s that photographic technology had developed sufficiently to allow the photography of animals in nature to become a regular practice. Yet, the technological possibilities opened up by the introduction of dry-plate films, fast shutters, and fast lenses were not sufficient to resolve the difficulties of photographing animals in nature by themselves. [6]

In order to make successful images of live animals in nature photographers needed to bring about the proximity of animal and camera under appropriate light conditions. Although in the early 1890s exposure times were short enough to capture mobile subjects, the limited focal length of the available fast lenses necessitated close proximity to the subject for a decent exposure. This need for close proximity created difficulties for photographers attempting to take pictures of wary game animals in the wild. To solve the problem of obtaining images of unwilling and non-posing animal subjects at close range, photographers availed themselves of hunting techniques. The hunting blind was one of many hunting techniques that 19th century animal photographers adapted to photograph animals in nature which also included the use of jacklighting, tripwires, and dog packs.[7] The use of these techniques coalesced in the photographic practice known as camera hunting which structured much of late-19th and early 20th-century animal photography in nature.[8] The practice began in the United States in the early 1890s and spread to Africa and Europe by the beginning of the 20th century. In camera hunting, photographers sought photographs of live animals in nature as hunting trophies. The camera hunters described their practice as hunting and positioned it as an extension of gun hunting which could be practiced out of season or after game limits were reached. The rhetoric of camera hunting emphasized the woodcraft and skill necessary to produce the images. The camera hunters placed particular emphasis on the difficulty of stalking game with a camera. Their images were intended to celebrate the moment of contact between the hunter and his animal subject. The camera hunters published their photographs as trophies in sporting journals.[9] The hunting blind was not central to the rhetoric of camera hunting but it was essential to the later development of the photographic blind and wildlife photography. To better understand the evolution of the photographic blind from its roots in the hunting blind, it is important to examine the structure of the hunting blind.

The Hunting Blind

The photographic blind developed out of the traditional practice of the hunting blind, a millennia old practice whose origins are both multiple and obscure. Blinds are found in many hunting cultures. This is not surprising given how simple the apparatus is in its most basic form. In practice there are a wide variety of types and kinds of hunting blind. In their most general form, hunting blinds are screens or obstructions behind which the hunter can wait for prey. The hunter locates the blind facing an area in which the animal’s presence is anticipated, i.e., alongside a game trail, near a watering hole, nest, or den. In practice this can mean setting up a portable blind, building a blind out of reeds or branches, or even simply finding something to hide behind as in the case of a convenient boulder. The blind faces a targeting ground--an area in front of the blind from which the hunter cannot be seen and upon which they can focus their firepower. Hunters often use various techniques to hasten the arrival of the desired animals to the blind. In some cases, as with duck or moose hunting, hunters call the animals to the blind by imitating an animal call.[10] A related technique, appealing to sight not sound, used to bring animals to the blind is to place decoys--replica animals--in front of the blind to signal that the area is safe and/or attractive to the desired animals.[11] The use of decoys necessarily implies the use of some form of hunting blind. Replica animals cannot attract other animals without the presence of the hunters being obscured. Hillel Schwarz traces the use of decoys, and by implication that of hunting blinds, back to the time of Tutankhamen.[12] Hunters use a different sort of lure to bring animals to the blind when they bait animals. Bear hunters hang rotting meat in trees to accustom bears to coming to an area to be fed. Once bears become accustomed to the bait as a source of food, the hunters can then wait in a nearby blind assured that a bear should soon come into range. However, in all of these cases, regardless of how the animal arrives at the blind, the final act is the same: when the animal is within range the hunter springs forth from ambush and attempts to take its life. The point of the apparatus, and perhaps why it is now called a blind, is that it obscures the hunter’s presence from the animal.[13] Animals will approach much closer to the blind than they would to an unhidden hunter. The blind allows a clear shot at what would otherwise be elusive game.

              The hunting blind’s principles are concealment and surprise. Blind hunting requires patience. Blind hunters must be able to remain still and silent for long periods of time. The use of the blind conveys certain advantages on the hunter. Blinds allow hunters to catch animals that move faster than they do, animals they could not track down (like birds), and animals that can enter terrain that they find difficult or impassable (a moose in dense brush). Blinds allow hunters to surprise animals but generally give them only a brief window of opportunity to capture or kill the animal before it flees.

              We can see the structure of a nineteenth-century hunting blind in Cherry Kearton’s photograph Grouse Shooter in Butt.[14] (Figure 1) ‘Butt’ is the late-nineteenth-century British term for a simple hunting blind devoted to shooting grouse. The image was published in Roger Kearton’s 1897 volume, With Nature and a Camera Being the Adventures and Observations of a Field Naturalist & and Animal Photographer.[15] In the book the Keartons described their practices of photography and their time spent photographing in St. Kilda, an Island in the Western Hebrides. The brothers describe the bird hunting practices of the Islanders and their own photography as part of a continuum. They illustrate both hunting blinds and the beginnings of the photo blind as well as their other mechanisms for photographing birds. Their photograph, Our Outfit, depicts rappelling gear, tree climbing equipment, a pistol, and their camera. (Figure 2) The image suggests the range of techniques they used to gain proximity to their animal subjects.

              Richard (1862-1928) and Cherry Kearton (1871-1940) were pioneering naturalists and wildlife photographers.[16] With Nature and a Camera was the brothers' second book of animal photographs. Their first book, British Birds’ Nests--How, Where and When to Find and Identify Them, was the first British book to feature photographs of wild birds.[17] The brothers were famous for the acrobatic feats they performed to obtain photographs of birds including rappelling down sheer cliff faces to photograph sea birds and rigging up ladders in tree tops to photograph song birds. Photographing a Nest in a Tree shows the brothers using a ladder to photograph a bird’s nest. (Figure 3)The photograph attests to the risks the brothers took to make their photographs. It also should be understood as a demonstration image, posed for the camera rather than as a snapshot capturing them in action.[18]

              Cherry’s photograph, Grouse Shooter in a Butt, shows two men and a dog behind a low stone wall. (Figure 1) The photographic is posed; it is not a document of the blind in action but rather a demonstration image.[19] Thus, while we can read the image to gain an understanding of the structure and operation of the hunting blind, we must remember that it shows us the hunters’ and photographer’s idealization of its use not its actual use. The wall is set into the ground and forms a rough semi-circle facing left and occupying the centre of the image. We see the wall from an oblique angle--we can see inside the blind and the ground behind it but cannot see in front of the blind. The wall is a permanent fortification; the moss on the rocks indicates the structure has been in place for a long time. As a semi-circle, the blind is oriented, it only works in one direction and it faces an out-of-frame feature that functions as its targeting ground. The continued use of the same hunting location indicates either infrequent use of the blind or that the blind overlooks some choice feature of the landscape that is especially attractive to grouse. While the second option seems to make more sense, why build a stone butt facing ground grouse are not particularly attracted to, we are not given to see the targeting ground and can only tell that the blind is located on the uneven terrain of a Scottish heath.

              The photograph shows two men engaged in grouse hunting. One man stands to the left of the image with his shotgun readied peering out over the blind and his gun resting on top of wall. Only his head protrudes above the top of blind. He is wearing a tweed jacket with matching knickers and a cap. His clothes are well cut and expensive looking suggesting he is a figure of some stature. The second man is on the right of the image and is crouched over behind the wall near a bundle of provisions. He is wearing a jacket and trousers that appear to be not as well cut as those of the first man. He too is carrying a gun but not in a manner that would enable him to quickly fire it. He is bent over and holding the gun with one hand by the barrel. From his posture it seems likely that he is loading the gun.[20] The dog lies in front of the first man facing the photographer, and hence the viewer. The dog is a retriever, a gun dog, bred to fetch shot animals. After the shooting, the dog will be sent out to fetch the kill.

              The first man is obviously ready to shoot some grouse but the second man’s role is more ambiguous. He could be preparing to shoot or he could be there to assist the first man. The Keartons’ caption for the image helps to decipher the relation between the figures.[21] Their title, Grouse Shooter in Butt, is singular, grouse shooter not grouse shooters, this suggests that the second man is in the service of the first most likely as a loader. The use of a loader was common and makes sense given the mechanics of grouse hunting from a blind. A shotgun loaded with birdshot has only a limited range of effectiveness. Shotguns are the favoured weapon for bird hunting as a charge of small shot can kill a bird without destroying the body. Shotguns are an area effect weapon and are pointed not aimed at their target. Breach loading shotguns have a single shot per barrel and cannot be reloaded in the firing position.[22] The gun must be broken open and the shells replaced by hand. As well, once fired upon the grouse will fly away. Having a loader allows the shooter to fire more shots, and hopefully kill more grouse, in the brief period the grouse remain in range. The retriever, like the loader, is there to assist the grouse shooter. Both the loader and the retriever remain completely behind the wall so that whatever movements they make are completely invisible from in front of the blind. The bundle of provisions beside the loader suggests that the men are prepared to remain in the butt for a significant length of time waiting for grouse to come into range.

              I suggest that we can understand the butt, and the supporting cast, as a mechanism for killing grouse with a minimum of effort on the part of the shooter. The loader and the dog supplement the operations of the blind, and make the shooter more efficient, but they do not fundamentally alter them. The butt is a very rudimentary hunting blind; it is an unenclosed semi-circle and is thus open to the elements limiting the length of stay to hours rather than days and restricting it to functioning in only one direction. It circumscribes a limited field of effectiveness; its targeting ground is the arc described by the curve of the wall in combination with the shotgun’s effective range. Should conditions on the heath change, should the targeting ground cease to attract grouse, the blind would have to be abandoned as it is impractical to move and not easily changed.

              Contemporary hunting blinds are often much fancier but the underlying mechanism remains the same: the shooter waits in the blind focused on a location where animals are expected and catches them by surprise when they arrive.[23] Blind hunting is marked by long periods of waiting punctuated by brief periods of activity. As noted above, the blind can be supplemented with other techniques to encourage the arrival of animals, such as mating calls, decoys, bait or the use of beaters to funnel animals towards the blind. However, while these techniques can shorten the wait or increase the number of animals on the targeting ground by making it more attractive, they do not fundamentally alter the mechanics of the blind.

              In its mechanics the hunting blind is a screen that allows seeing without being seen. (Figure 4) The hunter hides behind an obstruction waiting for the animal. The “invisibility” conveyed by the hunting blind is serial rather than permanent. It allows hunters to surprise animals but, once they have revealed themselves by attacking, it does not continue to provide invisibility beyond the moment of attack. The hunting blind produces dead animals by controlling the hunter’s visibility. In contrast, the photographic blind produces images of animals by controlling the photographer’s visibility. However, the difference between the operation of the photographic blind and the hunting blind is not simply reducible to the difference between camera and gun. While the difference between the camera and the gun is both significant and important, the role of the apparatus is determined not simply by the kinds of representations it enables but also by the social and discursive networks it inhabits.

Adapting the Photographic Blind

The hunting blind was one of many hunting techniques pressed into service by nineteenth-century animal photographers in their quest to obtain images of live animals in their natural habitats. It was independently adapted by several photographers on separate occasions. The earliest live animal photographers utilized the form of the hunting blind without making claims for the blind’s effects on the images produced. These photographers emphasized stalking in their discussion of photographic techniques. Their discussions of blinds were without rhetorical emphasis. The earliest animal photographers used blinds in an almost identical manner to a hunter in a hunting blind. They waited in their blinds and took “snap-shots” at animals.

              In this section I examine the adaptation of the hunting blind to live animal photography. This is not an exhaustive survey of animal photographers and their use of photographic blinds. Nor is it a listing of all the early photographers who used some form of blind, rather, it is an analysis of the formation of the photographic blind as an apparatus, an assemblage of practices and discourses thought to produce images in a certain way. I concentrate on those moments in which the function of blind changes and on the development of its rhetoric. The focus is on published imagery and discussions of the photographic blind as my interest is in explicating how the photographic blind comes to circulate as a public discourse. My interest is in the photographic blind’s coming into representation. Thus, my interest in the material practice of the photographic blind goes only so far as it becomes public and circulates.

The Wallihans and the Unremarked Photographic Blind

Allen Grant Wallihan (1859-1935) was a frontier postmaster who became a pioneering animal photographer and celebrated woodsman. Wallihan was born in Fortville, Wisconsin in 1859. He became the postmaster at Lay, Colorado in 1885. During his life he was involved in ranching and mining in Colorado. He began photographing animals in 1889 and had his first successful results in 1890. His wife, Mary Augusta Wallihan (nee Higgins) was born in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin.[24] Mary assisted Allen Grant in his photography and was co-author of their first book.[25] The Wallihans’ 1894 book Hoofs, Claws and Antlers of the Rocky Mountains was the first book devoted to the photographing of animals in nature.[26] (The second edition of the book, published in 1902, added an introduction by Buffalo Bill.) The book was originally published in a numbered edition of 1000 and was illustrated with original photographic prints mounted on card.[27] In the book the Wallihans showed images of freshly killed animals alongside images of live ones and described in detail how many of the live animals they photographed were shot shortly after exposure. Mary described their photographs as an attempt to preserve “the game in photography for the world at large.”[28] Seeing the game as bound to disappear in the face of continued progress, they sought to document it for future generations so that they too could experience the animals.

The Wallihans, one of the first teams of photographers to use a hunting blind to photograph animals, provide a useful description of the difficulties involved in using the hunting blind for photography. In Hoofs, Claws and Antlers of the Rocky Mountains the Wallihans provide several descriptions of photographing animals from blinds.[29] However, they include no pictures of their blinds. While they include a picture of their camera, and multiple shots of each other, they treat blinds as a basic hunting technique that should be well known and thus not worth illustrating. For the Wallihans the photographic blind is essentially unmarked; they make no claims for its effects on the imagery and only discuss it in passing. Many of their photographs were taken from blinds and while blinds are mentioned they are never described in detail.

              As pioneers of animal photography in nature, the Wallihans ran into many difficulties trying to adapt the hunting blind to photography. For example, in November of 1893, Mr. Wallihan described building a blind and then waiting in it to photograph antelope.

Building a blind where a small side gulch came into the larger one, out of sage brush and weeds, I was soon ready for Mr. Antelope and all his family. Here comes a buck, but they come in below me, scare at something, run back and come right down in front of me. When they walked out in front of me as you see them on top of the bank of the gulch and stopped, I was suffering with buck fever, but after I made the exposure I felt relieved. They came right down within thirty feet of me to the water, but scared again and went higher up to drink. I made exposures on one or two other bunches but got my camera aimed too low and cut off parts of them.[30]

While Mr. Wallihan described waiting in the blind for the animals to approach, the focus of the description was on his excitement at being able to photograph animals. Waiting in blind, Mr. Wallihan described thinking like a hunter and suffering from ‘buck fever,’ the desire to blast away at anything that moved.[31] Needless to say, this feeling was inappropriate to animal photography. It was inappropriate not because animal photography and hunting are fundamentally opposed but rather it was inappropriate as it conflicted with the limitations of the Wallihans’ equipment. As his description indicated, one of the difficulties, in 1893, of using a hunting blind to photograph animals was that if the camera was not well aimed prior to the animal's arrival it would not produce decent exposures. The camera needed be aimed and focused prior to the arrival of the animal. If the animal did not pass in front of the focal point there would be no good exposure. Mr. Wallihan emphasized this point in another description of photographing from the blind, “Next day I made an exposure on the best bunch at this same spot, forty-five feet, but the camera was pointed too low. If it should be wrong I could not move to alter it, as they would leave instanter. And it is very much a gamble to tell when they will come.”[32] Although there were animals in front of the blind, Mr. Wallihan was unable to photograph them. Moving the camera to re-focus would have spooked the antelope. Because of the materials that the Wallihans were working with, they could not catch an animal on the run the way a gun hunter could; if the animal moved too quickly, it would simply fail to properly expose.

              As well, working with plate negatives made it impossible to change the plate while the animals were present. This difficulty is brought to light in Mr. Wallihan’s description of a failed attempt at photographing deer. Mr. Wallihan wrote, “Shortly after I took a snap shot at five but the negative was not good. One of these came within ten feet of me and veered off, landing above me. I had exposed him on the five and could not change, as she would have scared at the motion.”[33] Late-nineteenth-century cameras were generally bulky and difficult apparatuses to manoeuvre through the woods. As such they could not easily be moved or aimed without alerting animals to their presence. Thus, the cameras had to be focused in advance, sometimes on a very small area, in order to take a successful picture. If the animal failed to occupy the focal point there would be no picture. Even the act of exposing the film, the click of the shutter, could alert the animal and ruin the picture.

              Most of the Wallihans’ blinds appear to have been traditional hunting blinds of the kind briefly described in the first quotation.[34] These were bower blinds crafted out of available materials. However, Mr. Wallihan also used his camera cloth as a blind suggesting an alternative conceptual genealogy for the photo blind.[35] Camera cloths were used to allow the photographer to look through the lens without spoiling the plate. The Wallihans’ use of the camera cloth as a blind suggests a link to the photographic camera’s prehistory in the camera obscura. The camera obscura is a darkened chamber with a small hole in the side admitting light. The hole acts as a lens and inverted images of the outside world form on the opposite wall of the chamber. Mr. Wallihan’s use of the camera cloth can be thought of as re-extending the camera obscura of the photographic camera’s body to include the photographer. Yet, while drawing this analogy, we must understand that the photographic camera, while indisputably drawing on the camera obscura in its construction, cannot be understood in terms of the camera obscura, it is a radically different apparatus.[36] However, thinking through the camera obscura may be helpful for understanding the photographic blind as an apparatus. As Jonathan Crary argues, the camera obscura provides a model for thinking of the world in terms of internal and external; the viewer in the camera obscura is seeing the world reproduce itself as an image.[37]

Crary suggests the camera obscura’s enclosure of the observer demarcates a ‘meaningful’ separation between an inside figured as private and an outside figured as public. The inclusion of the observer in the apparatus is the key to this effect. Crary’s description provides a model for thinking the effects of the photographic blind on photography. We can think of the blind’s incorporation of the observer in the apparatus as reactivating the camera obscura’s enforcement of a distinction between interior and exterior. To be inside the blind is to not be in the world. Yet, as Mr. Wallihan’s descriptions of waiting in the blind make clear, he was unconvinced of his radical separation from the animals. He felt exposed and worried that at any minute he might alert the animals to his presence. To resolve this disjunction it is helpful to recall Crary’s caution that “The formal operation of a camera obscura as an abstract diagram may remain constant, but the function of the device or metaphor within an actual social or discursive field has fluctuated decisively (29).” That is to say, this inscription of a sharp distinction between inside and out by the form of the camera obscura is not inevitability or necessarily the dominant effect. For the photographic blind to come to mark the image with a sharp distinction between interiority and exteriority, the blind’s potential inscribe such a distinction must start to become an important part of its use. For this to happen, photographers have to begin adapting the blind to photography.

The Keartons and the Adaptation of the Blind

The Keartons, like the Wallihans, experimented with many different techniques to photograph animals. In fact, it would be fair to say that the Keartons were far more inventive in their attempts to find ways to get their camera within range of animals. Unlike the Wallihans, the Keartons represented their blinds. They also experimented with them and adapted them to photography.[38] As we have seen, the Keartons photographed a traditional hunting blind. They also photographed from bower blinds though they never photographed them. Traditional bower blinds did not hold up to the extended observation required to photograph birds and were abandoned.[39] Their representational absence is significant as the Keartons made images of most of their techniques for photographing animals.

              The Keartons’ representations of their photographic techniques perform at least a dual function. They show how the photographers photographed the animals and they perform the function of authenticating the photographs that are produced.  As Jennifer Tucker informs us, “the acceptance of photographs as objective, meaningful representations in Victorian science and culture did not happen automatically; on the contrary, assent to claims supported by the evidence of photographs was contingent upon their meeting several criteria, for example, of production and of use, established in different settings by a pool of experts.”[40] In the late-nineteenth century, photography was not yet seen as objective and needed additional evidence to testify to the validity of its results.[41] Thus we find the techniques used to enable the photographs photographed themselves. “The photograph,” Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have argued, “...did not end the debate over objectivity; it entered the debate.”[42] One of the ways photography bolstered its authority was to require “witnesses to the production of the image.”[43] The means of representation are represented to testify to the authenticity and objectivity of the representations. This meaning of the representation of the photographic process should be understood to be operating in tandem with their overtly espoused pedagogical purpose. The "how to" functions both to explain how to photograph animals and to authenticate the resulting photographs.

              The first photographic blind the Keartons photographed was a compound blind they used to photograph a Kingfisher. (Figure 5) The image, Photographing a Kingfisher, shows a photographer lying on a path hiding behind a board propped up on an angle.[44] The camera lies ahead of the photographer on a footbridge covered by a cloth and focused on the pond. The photograph shows a snow-covered field in the foreground with barren trees as background. The photographer is wearing thick winter clothes and a winter cap. The shutter will be sprung using the long pneumatic tube extending from the man to the camera. It requires dedication to lie unmoving on cold ground waiting to get a picture. The camera is likely focused on the bird’s nest or some other spot that the bird is known to frequent. The bird must be convinced that that the camera set up poses no threat before it will return. Thus, the photographer must be prepared to spend a long time waiting. It would appear that the blind is divided in two in order to minimize the obstruction near the nest and hasten the bird’s return. The camera is hidden in its own blind. The resulting image will thus be separated from the viewpoint of photographer; it will not represent what he saw.[45] The compound blind is the beginning of the separation within the photographic image of the animal and photographer.

              Later, the Keartons developed more complicated and elaborate photographic blinds. The first and most famous of which was their artificial cow. The Keartons built a hollow cow within which Cherry could hide and photograph animals. One of their most famous photographs shows Cherry Kearton stuck in the upside down cow. (Figure 6) The cow lies on its back in a field with its legs straight up in the air; Cherry’s legs can be seen sticking up in the middle. The cow is lying on a slight downslope and is shot from below so that it appears silhouetted against the sky. Like a turtle on its back, Cherry was unable to right himself without Richard’s help. This was not the only misadventure with the fake cow; there is also a probably apocryphal story that the cow once attracted the unwanted attentions of a bull. Together, both episodes suggest there are real disadvantages in trying to disappear as something specific in the landscape. Yet, there may also be advantages to appearing as something else; the story of the bull can also be read as a verification of the disguise’s effectiveness. As in Pliny’s famous story of the contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius, deceiving the animal is a credit to the artist. W.J.T. Mitchell reflects on the lessons of Pliny’s story as part of a broader consideration of the role of animals in our understandings of visual representation and what the trope of animals looking at representations reveals about illusion.[46] He argues that seeing animals be fooled by representations provides us “with a double revelation and reassurance – that human representations are true, accurate, and natural (that animals ‘agree’ and ‘comprehend’ them of their own accord), and that human power over others is secured by mastery of representations (the animals are forced to agree, not of their own accord, but automatically) (334).” In the case of the blind, the deception of the animal convinces us that the illusion is complete. Birds must be fooled by the blind because bulls are fooled. It thus suggests that the animals in images produced by the blind must be behaving naturally because they will be acting as if we weren’t there. However, as Mitchell points out, the story also asserts our control over animals suggesting that we have deceived them into revealing their secrets by creating a representation that gives us control over them.

              It was in their 1898 book, Wildlife at Home How to Study and Photograph It, that the brothers significantly developed the photographic blind beyond the parameters of the traditional hunting blind.[47] Among their other experimental photographic blinds the Keartons built an Artificial Rubbish Heap.[48] This was a wagon piled high with grass creating a frame within which Cherry could hide with the camera. As a wheeled vehicle, the rubbish heap had the advantage of a certain degree of mobility. However, its design limited it to operating on flat terrain or near roads; it could not enter into anything approaching a forest. The rubbish heap blind would appear to be limited to photographing around the farm. However, the blind does appear to be indistinguishable from a real rubbish heap and thus acts as further evidence for the effectiveness of the photographic blind.

              The Keartons’ most important invention for the further development of the photographic blind was their artificial tree trunk. As Richard described, the brothers developed “an imitation tree-trunk of sufficient internal capacity to accommodate my brother and his camera.”[49] The tree trunk is illustrated in two images in Wildlife at Home. The first, Artificial Tree Trunk Open,[50] shows Cherry Kearton in a narrow tent before a large tree (Figure 7). He is dressed in a suit and holding the tent flap open to show the camera and tripod in the structure with him. The image is paired with a second photograph titled Artificial Tree Trunk Closed.[51] (Figure 8) The second photograph shows the structure in the same position as the first, now with the flap closed and the exterior covered with vegetation. The tree trunk blind was lightweight, portable and appropriate for most situations.[52] This was the least ‘realistic’ of the Keartons’ blinds. There was no attempt to represent the texture of tree bark and the use of ivy, to disguise the exterior, was minimal.

              The Keartons’ photographic blinds were intended to allow close observation of birds by making the observer invisible to them. They were designed for long-term occupation creating the possibility for multiple shots of the same animal. The blinds no longer needed to be reset after each picture of the animal. Fully enclosed blinds allowed photographers to refocus and change film without disturbing the animals as they hid all of the photographer’s movements. It is important that the Keartons blinds are well enough camouflaged to deceive humans. This is not because we can be assured that animals will also be deceived; it is unclear that animals will see things the same way as we do. What it does do is help convince us that the humans inside these blinds are well hidden. The use of the apparatus slides from simply enabling the taking of the picture to allowing the observation of birds in a way that would not otherwise be possible. The pictures of the apparatus assure us that the photographs we see are of birds observed close up from life.

Francis Herrick and the Observational Blind

The photographic blind’s potential to allow long-term observation was further developed in the early-twentieth century by Francis Hobart Herrick, Ph.D. (1858-1940). Herrick was the first professor of biology at Adelbert Western Reserve University, later Case Western Reserve, and wrote the definitive natural history of the lobster.[53] Herrick was also the first to study the life of the bald eagle and wrote the first major biography of Audubon.[54] C. A. W. Guggsisberg suggests Herrick “was probably the first photographer to use as a hide or blind a plain, uncamouflaged tent.”[55]

              Herrick’s work marks the incorporation of the photographic blind into the discourse of ornithology. This incorporation was part of the growing importance of photography to the practice of ornithology. As Alfred Gross notes, in his 1933 history of bird photography in America, “By the beginning of the twentieth century bird photography was no longer a mere novelty and a fad. Bird pictures were not considered an end in themselves merely to please the eye but as important records of bird life and bird behavior.”[56] Thus, in the early twentieth century bird photographs were no longer simply trophies or aesthetic objects; they were in the process of becoming disciplinary objects.

              Herrick presented his findings on the use of the photographic blind for observing and documenting birds in his article, “A New Method of Bird Study and Photography.”[57] In this essay, Herrick presented the photographic blind as an essential tool for studying and documenting birds. He argued that the photographic blind enabled photographers to see birds in a manner that was previously not possible. It was now possible to create a series of photographs of birds on the nest. The photographic blind was thus central to the essay. From an unmarked technique in the Wallihans’ work the photographic blind had in Herrick’s work come to occupy center stage in the thinking of animal photographers. Herrick contrasted his new method of bird photography with what he described as the old-fashioned techniques of stalking animals (i.e, the practices associated with camera hunting).

In the new method of the study and photography of birds, the conditions . . . are completely changed. . . . instead of attempting to go to the observer--nest, young, branch, and all. The nest, whatever its original position, is moved with its supports to a favorable place for study. A green tent is then pitched beside it, and under this perfect screen the observer can watch by the hour and accurately record the shifting panorama of nest life.[58]

Thus, in contrast to the stalking methods associated with camera hunting, Herrick proposed to use the photographic blind, and its ability to obscure the photographer, to conduct prolonged up close observation and photography of birds. Merely obtaining an image of an animal was no longer enough. Herrick sought characteristic images of birds.

              There were two keys to Herrick’s method: “(1) The control of the nesting site, and (2) The concealment of the observer.”[59] For concealment of the observer, Herrick used a tent blind.

For an observatory I have adopted a green tent which effectually conceals the student, together with his camera and entire outfit. The tent is pitched beside the nest, and when in operation is open only from one point, marked by a small square window, in line with the photographic lens and the nest (427).

Herrick described a fairly simple blind, a canvas tent with a single hole for the lens. The article included three images of the photographic blind. The first, The Author’s Tent in a Field, shows the blind set up in a farmer’s field.[60] (Figure 9) The blind, a tall, thin canvas tent, is set up in the lower right hand corner of the image. In the middle distance is a dry stone fence beyond which is a road. The window in the side of the tent is not visible in the photograph. The tent is held up with stakes and guy wires, thus while portable, it is by no means quick and straightforward to erect. The second image of the tent, The Tools of Bird-Photography: The Tent Rolled up in Portable Form at Night, shows the tent alongside the rest of Herrick’s photographic equipment.[61] (Figure 10) Leaning up against a tree, the blind is now tightly wrapped in a bundle around the tent poles. While packaged to be compact and portable, the blind is still relatively bulky. Yet, as the third image shows, the blind is capable of being transported and set up in fairly dense brush. (Figure 11) The image, Tent in Bushy Pasture Beside Nest of Chestnut-Sided Warbler, shows the blind peeking through the foliage.[62] The blind has been taken into the woods and set up next to the nest. Yet, as the essay made clear, moving the blind into the woods to set up next to the nest was not typical of Herrick’s method. This becomes obvious when we understand Herrick’s first criterion for bird photography: controlling the nesting site.

Rather than climb into the tops of trees with his camera, like the Keartons, Herrick’s solution was to bring the bird nest down to the camera. He defined the nesting site as “the nest and its immediate surroundings, such as a twig, branch, hollow trunk, stem, or whatever part of a tree the nest may occupy, a bush, stub, strip of sod, or tussock of sedge,--that is, the nest with its immediate settings.” [63]  Herrick would remove the nesting site from its original location by cutting it out of the tree and set it up on the ground next to his blind. (Figure 12) The image depicts a branch from a tree, set up on a pivot with a white cloth strung behind it for contrast. There is wire netting around the base of the pivot to prevent predators from accessing the nesting site. The tent is fairly close to the branch and it may seem laughable to a contemporary viewer that Herrick felt that this set up constituted non-intervention in the nesting site. The image makes clear the amount of work the blind is doing in erasing the photographer’s presence. This blind not appearing as something ordinary in the landscape; instead, it is erasing the photographer’s presence by appearing as a neutral object and overcoming the significant change in the nest’s situation.

Although this seems like a drastic intervention by contemporary standards, Herrick insisted that in resituating the nesting site he was not in any way disturbing the occupants. He argued that the “sudden displacement of the nesting bough is of no special importance to either old or young” likening it to the transfer of a human apartment from the fourth story to the ground floor.[64] Thus, while Herrick supported moving nests to enable easy and prolonged observation, he did so out of a belief that in so doing he did not alter anything essential. Although, he had some sense that the site of the nest was important, he believed that only the immediate surrounding was necessary. Yet, despite not conceiving of nest and animal as inviolate, not seeing animal and human as truly separate, Herrick’s work was the beginning of photographic blind as the erasure of human presence. The photographic blind instantiated a new way of seeing animals; the blind allowed its viewers to see and document the daily life of birds.

With note-book in hand you can sit in your tent, and see and record everything which transpires at the nest, -- the mode of approach, the kind of food brought, the varied activities of the old and young, the visits of intruders and their combats with the owners of the nest, the capture of prey which sometimes goes on under your eye. No better position could be chosen for hearing the songs, responsive calls, and alarm notes of the birds. You can thus gather materials for an exact and minute history of life at the nest, and of the behaviour of birds during this important period. More than this, you can photograph the birds at will, under the most perfect conditions, recording what no naturalist has ever seen, and what no artist could ever hope to portray. The birds come and go close to your eye, but unconscious of being observed (430).

According to Herrick, the birds he photographed were unaware of being observed (despite his movement of their nests). This was the beginning of the sense of the photographic blind as conveying invisibility. Because the blind made the observer’s presence unobservable to the birds, the photographs show us the birds acting as if we were not there (because for them we are not).[65] What we see is what we would see if we weren’t there. The photographic blind presents these photographs to us as photographs taken as if we did not exist. The photographic blind allows its occupant to conduct an unprecedented observation of animals. It also produces series of photographs documenting the behaviour of birds. These included images of the mother bringing food home to the young.

Where the Keartons had climbed to the top of a tree to photograph the eggs in a nest, Herrick’s process allowed the production of images documenting the nesting behaviour of the wren. (Figures 13 and 14) The first image, Wren Cleaning Her Nest, shows the mother bird with her head protruding from the opening in the branch. The long, thin image shows the length of the branch with the wren’s head appearing about half way up on the left side of the branch. She has a piece of debris in her mouth that she is in the process of removing from the nest. The second image, Wren (Life-Size) Climbing to the Nest with a Moth in its Bill, is a close up of the wren climbing the surface of the branch with the body of a moth in her mouth. The wings of the moth have been removed and there is little background or context in the image. We are able to make out feathers on her breast and see the details of her feet as they grip the bark. These examples from Herrick’s practice are very different images than those produced by earlier photographers in their documentation of the daily life of the birds.

With Herrick the photographic blind comes to be marked as significant for its ability to produce new kinds of animal images. These images are no longer thought of in terms of a connection to the photographer. The observer or photographer in the blind has become an interchangeable element in a larger disciplinary structure. They fulfill a professional role documenting the bird’s behavior. Herrick’s work marks the beginning of the photographic blind’s engagement with ornithology.[66] Its absorption by the disciplinary formation is the key to its new function. The photographs the blind produces now count as knowledge of the animal; they provide access to its truth.

              As well, the photographic blind itself came to be understood as conveying invisibility on its occupant. Yet, this understanding of the photographic blinds’ invisibility was not yet accompanied by a sense of non-intervention. While Herrick’s work was an important stage in the development of the blind it was not widely adopted. As Gross writes, “not many naturalists have approved of Prof. Herrick’s methods of involving the disturbance of birds by the removal of the nest.”[67] Herrick’s disturbance of the birds did not conform to the ideal of non-intervention at the heart of mechanical objectivity.[68] Thus, Gross adds that Herrick’s method not only raises the “possibility of harm to the young birds” through its intervention but, more importantly, “it does not show the bird in its real environment (166).” While Herrick’s method allowed the documentation of birds on the nest, its disturbance of the nest came to be seen as inauthentic in comparison to the images produced by the further development of the photographic blind.

Frank Michler Chapman and the Formalization of the Photographic Blind

Frank Michler Chapman (1864-1945) was a key figure in both American ornithology and the popularization of bird-watching.[69] His official involvement with ornithology began in 1888 when he took up a position as Joel Asaph Allen’s (1838-1921) assistant at the American Museum of Natural History. Chapman became the museum’s Associate Curator of Mammals and Birds in 1901, the Curator of Birds in 1908 and the first Chairman of the Department of Birds in 1920. He was the founding editor of the official journal of the second Audubon Society, Bird Lore, and was the inventor of the habitat diorama as a form of museal display.[70] He also originated the practice of Christmas counts in ornithology. Chapman was a key figure in integrating photography into the practice of ornithology and was responsible for formalizing the photographic blind.

              Chapman first discussed the use of the photographic blind in his 1900 book on bird photography Bird Studies with a Camera.[71] The book was a how-to manual of bird photography for the general public. In the book Chapman described the Kearton’s use of blinds and their connection to the hunting blind. “As the sportsman constructs blinds in which he may conceal himself from his prey, so the bird photographer may employ various means of hiding from his subjects (23).” However, at this point Chapman failed to see the importance of the blind to the practice of animal photography. Chapman argued that whatever benefit the blind might convey was outweighed by its inconvenience. “It is difficult to carry one of these blinds in addition to a camera, etc., without assistance, and I fear that the inconvenience attending their use will restrict them to the few enthusiasts who count neither time, labor, nor cost in attaining a desired end (24).” For this reason, Chapman noted that he preferred “to conceal my camera and make exposures from a distance rather than weight myself with a portable blind and endure the discomforts of being confined within it (24).” Thus, in 1900 Chapman saw no special value in the photographic blind for producing images and no significant difference in the images it produced.

              However, in 1901 Chapman invented his own version of the photographic blind. (Figure 15) He depicted his blind in an article published in 1908 on the use of the blind in bird photography. [72] Umbrella Blind, shows a tall, mushroom shaped tent against a forest backdrop. The tent is darker on top and fades in colour towards the bottom (following Abbott Thayer’s theory of countershading).[73] There is a slit in the tent on the right side of the image for the camera. In his history of ornithological photography, Gross describes the innovation of Chapman’s ‘umbrella’ blind:

This blind was merely a large leaf-green ‘sign’ umbrella which was opened within a bag large enough to fall to the ground. There was a large hole in the center of the umbrella for purposes of ventilation. The stick of the umbrella was supported by adjustable brass rods the lower one of which was driven into the ground. This blind had the valuable feature of being easily erected and when collapsed and folded made a very small and light bundle.[74]

Chapman’s umbrella blind simplified the construction and use of the blind and is the model for contemporary tent blinds. Chapman used the blind in his ornithological photography to document birds on the nest.

              Chapman’s use of the photographic blind to study nesting behavior is exemplified by his 1908 article “The Fish Hawks of Gardiner’s Island.”[75] His studies “were conducted from the umbrella blind which [he found] indispensable to success in any effort to gain an insight into the home life of birds (158).” The blind was necessary because of the openness of the beach that the hawks nested on. (Figure 16) Blind on Beach, depicts the blind and a fish hawk nest on an open stretch of beach. The nest is a pile of twigs and branches and the blind is a tall, slightly lopsided, plain canvas affair supported by a series of guy ropes. The terrain of the beach is flat and devoid of significant features other than the nest and the blind. As Chapman noted “Both nests and blinds were conspicuous objects on the beach (158).”  Because of this conspicuousness, it was necessary not only to for the photographer to use a blind but to divest it of human presence. The blind was de-humanized by having “a coöperator whose departure, after [Chapman] had entered the blind, apparently reassured the owners of the nest” that the blind was now empty (158). This form of bird photography was a great distance from the stalking photography emphasized by camera hunting. Chapman’s images of fish hawks were obtained not by sneaking up on them but by convincing or deluding them that the blind was empty.
              Chapman cited his use of the blind in the “Fish Hawks” article as exemplary when he presented a formal description of the blind’s operation in 1908. Chapman’s article, “The Use of a Blind in the Study of Bird-Life,” placed the blind at the center of bird-study. He argued that the blind was the solution to the central problem in bird study. As Chapman noted, “If one would study the habits of birds under natural conditions it is of the first importance that they be unalarmed by one’s presence (250).” The problem, he argued, was that “man’s presence is always a more or less disturbing element, if not to the bird in question, at least to other species with which it may chance to become associated (250).” Human presence was disturbing because “With bird as with man, the consciousness of being under observation induces more or less artificiality of manner (250).” If birds were aware of human presence they would not behave ‘naturally.’ We would instead see an artificial bird that reflects our presence. Thus, Chapman argued that if we wanted to “gain true insight into either bird life or human life, one’s subject should be unaware that they are the objects of scrutiny (250).” The truth of the animal, like that of the human, was only accessible when the animal believed itself to be unobserved. Otherwise, the animal, like the human, would compose itself for the viewer and would not be natural. For this reason Chapman argued that in order to capture the truth of the natural animal it was “necessary to employ an artificial blind” to erase the observer’s presence (250). As the historian of science Helen MacDonald explains,

Hides create a disembodied observer with no consequential presence, attempting to guarantee the epistemological reliability and truth of behavioural data through an assurance that the scientist in no way affects the behaviour of the animals observed. In a related sense, the hide literalises and concretises that ascetic withdrawal from the immediacy of the observed phenomena which is at the heart of the positivist-pragmatist ethos--translating a methodological, cognitive freeing from subjective involvement to a literal freeing from involvement.[76]

The blind performs of a double erasure of the observer. It separates the observer from the animal both literally and conceptually and thus guarantees the objectivity of the observations. In its production of observations of the animal the blind is forming a disciplinary object, a ‘natural’ animal that is inaccessible outside of the apparatus of the blind.

              Chapman confessed that he originally “did not appreciate the necessity for a hiding place which not only permitted one to photograph but to see (250).” However, he now argued that “a blind will be found to be of the greatest assistance in securing the proper point of view (250).” That is, the blind acted as a “‘cloak of invisibility’ from the shelter of which one may see unseen (252).”  Thus, in this article, Chapman linked the production of the truth of animals with the ability to see them while remaining unseen.

              Chapman clarified the operation of the blind and framed its contemporary understanding. He disavowed his earlier attempts to create a blind that mimicked a tree trunk as an example of “how far one may be carried on the wrong road by a false premise (250).” He suggested that his “fundamental error” was “the belief that the blind must be like some object in nature (250).” Instead Chapman argued that the blind’s “chief virtue is its immobility (250).” The blind’s immobility overcomes the suspicions of the birds and ultimately it becomes for them “a part of the landscape to be perched on if convenient (250).”

              Chapman described the experience of being in the blind more poetically in his 1908 autobiography Camps and Cruises of an Ornithologist. In it he described the pleasure he experienced while watching birds from “the shelter of this ‘cloak of invisibility’” that is the photographic blind.[77] Chapman indicated that

There is a supreme and wholesome pleasure in feeling that one has reached a point of vantage from which the drama of animal life may be studied without the performers knowing that they are under observation. Wholly aside from the often thrilling novelty of the experience and the thought that, even if unconsciously, one has been accepted as a part of the surroundings, there is a well-founded satisfaction in realizing that one is making an actual contribution to our knowledge of animal life, not based on the study of creatures in captivity, or of those placed under greater or less restraint by fear, but of animals in their native haunts, living their lives under absolutely natural conditions (xv-xvi).

Chapman conceived of the blind as allowing access to animals in their “absolutely natural conditions” in a way that produced knowledge about their lives. Thus, the blind enabled the production of new forms of knowledge about animals and in so doing produced a new understanding of what constituted a ‘natural’ animal.

The Photographic Blind and the Development of Animal Photography

Although the photographic blind began to influence animal photography after its formalization, it did not change the practice of animal photography overnight. Photographers continued to speak of their photography as camera hunting well after the photographic blind was in common use. Photographers even described waiting in the blind to photograph animals as a sport although they conceded that it was not an equivalent to hunting.[78] However, as the following quote from 1909 indicates, after its formalization the photographic blind was understood as central to animal photography.

Shyer woodland species were stalked by these indefatigable men disguised as moss-grown pollards; and dippers, wheatears, and others were outwitted by means of stage rocks that gradually appeared in their haunts and contained the crouching naturalist and his apparatus. The hollow sheep and Trojan bullock were invented for benefit of the curlew, plover, and other shy birds that nest in the open plain. If our naturalists had been given the magic gift of fernseed, they could scarcely have outwitted more completely the creatures of the wild that we formerly ‘studied’ by means of the scatter-gun and the rifle. Science has given us, it is true, the shoulder camera with which the very skilled can take flying shots, and the artillery of the telephoto lens, by means of which a good sitter can be taken at the distance of half-a-mile or more, but all the great triumphs of animal photography have been won by means of infinite patience and the stealthy approach of the artist within actual camera range.[79]

As the passage indicates, while the photographic blind was not the only new technique used in animal photography it was the central one. Both the photographic blind and the telephoto lens enabled photographers to take candid pictures of animals.[80] The two techniques can work in conjunction and combine to make animal photography easier. Yet I, like the passage, concentrate on the photographic blind. While the telephoto lens is part of the technical possibility of animal photography, the photographic blind is central to its conceptual understanding.

Since Chapman’s formulation the photographic blind has become a standard apparatus of wildlife photography. Contemporary blinds are used for everything from backyard bird feeder photography to photographing sea bird courtship and mating. Photographic blinds are now commercially manufactured in forms ranging from quickly set up portable blinds (that are essentially cloaks covering the body and camera) to camouflaged, multi-person, portable tents with built in ‘snouts’ for camera lenses.  With names like the Rue Pocket Blind or the Kirk N-visi Blind, these commercial blinds are advertised based on their comfort, convenience and portability. The N-visi/Bag portable photo blind is described as “very breathable and roomy enough for you to move inside without alarming wildlife.”[81] Similarly, the Kwik Camo photography blind is touted for its camouflaged mesh window that allows the occupant “to view wildlife without disruption.”[82]

Photographers emphasize the blind’s efficacy in allowing access to a wide spectrum of otherwise unavailable animal behaviors. As one of Canada’s foremost wildlife photographers describes “The greatest benefit of squirreling yourself inside a cramped, often overheated, and sometimes mosquito-infested photo blind is that you get to observe, and hopefully photograph, a greater range of animal behavior than would usually be possible if you were standing out in the open.  In my experience, natural behavior such as courtship, mating, grooming and predation rarely happen when a wild bird or animal is nervous and concentrating on a nearby Homo photographicus.”[83] Dr. Lynch’s formulation repeats the rhetoric of the blind developed by Chapman; the blind reveals the natural behaviour of animals that would be normally be un-see-able. 

In contemporary North American society photographic blinds have become wildlife tourist attractions permanently installed in National Parks and wildlife sanctuaries. For example, Klamath Basin National Wildlife Reserve Complex in California has six photo blinds that visitors can use.[84] Some of the blinds in public parks are a result of the Refuge Blind Program, a collaboration between The North American Nature Photography Association (NANPA) and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. Begun in 1997, the program’s “goal was to plan and construct photography blinds in specific locations within wildlife refuges. The blinds are designed to minimize impact on local wildlife while offering photographers a concealed location from which to photograph.”[85]  Photo blinds are also available for rent on private wildlife preserves.[86] Blinds have become an important, and sometimes lucrative, component of wildlife tourism.[87]

In her report on best practices in constructing photo blinds for public wildlife tourism, Deborah Ritchie Oberbillig defines the photo blind as “A blind (or ‘hide’) is a structure that conceals viewers and photographers from birds or other wildlife – facilitating opportunities for positive wildlife viewing experiences. A well designed blind facility makes it possible for people to see wildlife behaving naturally, undisturbed by human presence.”[88] Oberbillig’s definition retains the idea of the blind as an apparatus for viewing wildlife without being seen but places greater emphasis on the protection of the animals than on the viewer’s experiences. Oberbillig suggests that an important aspect of the use of blinds is to protect wildlife from the disturbance that photographers and other viewers can potentially cause.[89] Her argument shows the continued connection between the operations of the blind and the ethics of non-intervention operating in contemporary understandings of wilderness,[90]

              In the world of wildlife representation, the photographic blind is no longer a cutting edge technology. We are now in an era of 24 hour ‘wildlife’ television channels and have seen a number of new technologies deployed to represent animals.[91] These include flying camera drones, internet animal webcams, and crittercams.[92] Crittercam, which attaches cameras to animals to document their lifeworld, offers to take us beyond the intimacy offered by the photo blind by allowing us to “see the world through the eyes of an animal.” [93] Although scientists still use blinds to observe and document wildlife, Charles Bergman argues that the use of tagging and radio telemetry in wildlife biology has created a non-visual mode of representing and observing animals which erases both animal and human presence.[94]

The Photographic Blind as an Abstract Machine

As formalized by Chapman, the photographic blind is an abstract machine for producing effects of power. In describing the photographic blind as an abstract machine I am drawing on Foucault’s analysis of the panopticon. Like the panopticon, the photographic blind is a “machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad.”[95] However, the photographic blind dissociates seeing and being seen in a different manner than the panopticon. Designed by Jeremy Bentham as a prison, the panopticon is a hollow cylindrical structure in which inmates are isolated in illuminated cells that open onto the central courtyard and control tower. The structure displays its inmates to the central tower. As Foucault argues, the major effect of this display is “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that ensures the constant functioning of power (201).” However, what interests Foucault is not the specific configuration of the panopticon as a prison but the panopticon as “a generalizable model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men (205).” We must distinguish between the panopticon as an architectural structure and panopticism as “a diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use (204-5).” Thus, panopticism describes the internalizing of discipline through the consciousness of observation and display.

              In contrast, the photographic blind as an abstract machine inverts the relation to visibility at work in the panopticon by inducing in the observer a state of conscious and permanent invisibility while preventing the observed from realizing they are on display. Rather than inducing the observed to internalize the disciplinary effects of observation, the photographic blind induces the observer to externalize their relation to the observed. By disciplining the observer it promises access to the truth of the observed. It is both an inversion and an intensification of the panopticon. Panopticism fosters an awareness of the internalization of the other when being seen. The corollary of this awareness of our internalization of the other is the sense that unless we are unobserved when viewing the other all we see is a reflection of ourselves. Thus, within the panoptic framework, the only way to see the truth of the other is to see them without their knowledge of our presence. The photographic blind is instrumental in creating the category of the natural animal whose existence it guarantees. The photographic blind is a disciplinary apparatus producing specific relations to nature and animals. It produces a regime of animal truth.

              The photographic blind is a discursive formation regulating the appearance of animals. The apparatus produces images that are marked as candid shots of wild animals. So marked, these images produce natural animals; as Chapman put it, the blind shows us the animal ‘under absolutely natural conditions.’ That is to say, the blind allows us to see how animals behave when we are not around, which we take as revealing their true nature. The blind presents its function as the regulation of animal bodies by erasing the observer. However, its central operation is not the control of the animal body but its disciplining of the observer.[96] I claim the central operation of the blind and its images is to induce in the observer a state of conscious invisibility. Thus, the blind produces natural animals by erecting a conceptual separation between animals and humans. This conceptual separation is based in the blind’s production of invisibility.

The Photographic Blind, Photographic Invisibility and the Animal Gaze

              The invisibility conveyed by the photographic blind changes the relation between photographer and animal. Live animal photography in nature ceases to be a contest between animal and photographer in which the photograph marks the capture of the animal but rather the blind’s outwitting of the animal. It is not the photographer’s skill at woodcraft but rather the animal’s blithe obliviousness to human presence that is the key to photographing it. The photographic blind’s rhetoric of interiority marks the images with a radical separation between human and animal. These images come to shape our understanding of animals and appropriate animal imagery. Things that were impossible to see before the development of animal photography have become the standard for judging the truth of nature. Images that do not conform to these expectations become unreadable.

In one of the foundational texts of animal studies, John Berger argued that the techniques used to produce candid shots in wildlife photography, like the photographic blind and the telephoto lens, mark the images they produce with indications of their normal invisibility.[97]

Technically 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. The images exist thanks only to a technical clairvoyance (14).

By normal invisibility I take Berger to mean that these are images of scenes that would not be available to human sight. Berger clarifies the character of this invisibility thusly, “Baby owls or giraffes, the camera fixes them in a domain which, although entirely visible to the camera, will never be seen by the spectator. All animals appear like fish seen through the plate glass of an aquarium (14).” In other words, in wildlife photographs viewers see animals they could not normally see and which they will likely never see directly. These photographs are not representations of what viewers would see if they were there. Instead, Berger suggests, in these images animals are seen as if the viewer was not there. Wildlife photography, like an aquarium, allows viewers to observe the daily life of creatures whose world they cannot inhabit. The animals are behind the plane of the image, which the viewer only becomes aware of in terms of its transparency. Wildlife photographs offer their viewers transparent access to nature by erasing the traces of their taking, which Berger calls technical clairvoyance.[98] But, by erasing their taking, wildlife photographs leave no space within the images’ visual economies for the viewers to occupy and no entry points from which they can locate themselves in relation to the image. Wildlife photographs present a closed internal economy with no space inside for humans. Of course, the closed internal economy of the images is figured as the external, non-human economy of nature. Wildlife photographs offer their viewers access to a deep nature from which they are fundamentally excluded.[99]

              The importance of this sense of separation between human and nature to the rhetoric of wildlife photography can be seen in the Editors’ introduction to Time-Life Books’ Photographing Nature.

Our aim has been to show the natural world in all its infinite variety, almost as if man were the one animal that did not exist in it. Since he has left his mark nearly everywhere by now, ignoring his presence is not always easy for the photographer. . . . The pure landscape is here; the scenic highway, the gas station--even the backpacker--are not.[100]

In the introduction to Photographing Nature, the Editors suggest that within the logic of the photographs of nature they present, “man is really just an offstage voice (7).” While he might be the “the inventor-operator of the image making apparatus,” they argue that man “is not in the picture itself, and does not belong there (7).” Instead, they aimed to present photographs that showed the world “almost as if man were the one animal that did not exist in it (7).” In their view, true nature photography presents a vision of the world empty of humans and their traces. This is the rhetoric of the wildlife photograph.

              As the Editors argue, “man” is not in the wildlife photograph and “does not belong there.” If there are humans in a photograph, we know it is not a wildlife photograph. Wildlife photography is a representational regime constituted by human absence. This is a radical exclusion. Not only does the infinite variety of the natural world not include humans, but the pure landscape of wildlife photography has no place for the backpacker or the scenic view. It seems that in nature photography, no matter how minimal the impact, or how respectful the occupation of the landscape, human beings do not belong. This conception of nature and humans as fundamentally separate is a redeployment of the Garden mythos which envisions nature as pure and human beings as fallen and corrupting.[101] Wildlife photography posits a vanishing nature corrupted by human traces that the photographer must work to overlook.

              Yet, as the Editors’ argument also suggests, hiding or erasing human presence from photographic images is not easy, it takes work. Creating photographic imagery with no trace of humanity requires special procedures. (Not least because the photographic image itself can imply the presence of the photographer through the photographic apparatus.) In other words, photographs without human traces do not occur naturally. They must be produced. For the representational regime of wildlife photography to function, human presence must be regularly effaced. The required erasure is both practical and conceptual. Humans and their traces must be physically erased from the images and the images must be understood as unmarked by human presence. Wildlife photography thus depends on a double erasure of human presence from animal photography. The representational regime of wildlife photography, as articulated in such works as Photographing Nature, is predicated on the radical disjunction of humans and animals; animals are presented as occupying a separate realm of nature from which humans are fundamentally excluded. In other words, the genre of wildlife photography is predicated on the images being marked by what Berger calls their “normal invisibility.”

              Berger takes the “normal invisibility” inscribed in wildlife photographs as evidence for his argument that late-capitalist westerners can no longer really be in nature. He argues that the dislocations of industrialization and modernization have made it impossible for us to have an ‘authentic’ encounter with an animal. Because animals are no longer an integral part of our daily lives we can no longer engage with animals, or nature, except as figures of nostalgia. For Berger,

In the accompanying ideology, animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance. They are the objects of our ever-extending knowledge. What we know about them is an index of our power, and thus an index of what separates us from them. The more we know the further away they are (14).

In this passage, Berger suggests there is a vertiginous quality to wildlife photography. The closer to the animals the images bring us, the more they show us animals as they behave when we are not there, the further they distance us from those animals they bring close. In other words, wildlife photographs function as a substitute for a real nature that the images themselves assert is impossible for modern humans to occupy.[102]

              In arguing that wildlife photographs distort our understanding of nature, Berger’s argument overlaps with Derek Bousé’s claim that the images produced by the telephoto lens in wildlife films construct a false intimacy for their viewers.[103] In his analysis of wildlife films, Bousé argues that the use of close-ups in these films encourage viewers to produce para-proxemic relations with the animals depicted.[104] Bousé’s reading suggests that in wildlife films the use of the telephoto lens to produce close-ups can encourage a sense of contact between the viewer and the animal that the photographs produced by the blind discourage. However, for Bousé it is ultimately not the effects of the telephoto lens in producing images of animals depicted as inside our fight or flight zone that produces this false intimacy but rather the careful insertion of these images within the diegetic framework of the film through the use of a shot-countershot framework. It is the framing of the images, the relative size of the animal in relation to the frame, that can give wildlife images the sense of intimate proximity between viewer and animal – a proximity which their status as wild animals would otherwise suggest is impossible. In wildlife films, as Bousé notes, this ‘impossible intimacy’ is mediated through the editing. In photography, Berger suggests, it is mediated through the sense of normal invisibility inscribed in the images. Both readings maintain that wildlife representations construct distorted and inaccurate relations to the animals depicted. They differ in the nature of the distortion, Bousé arguing that wildlife films produce an over familiarity that doesn’t respect the wildness of animals while Berger argues that animal representation are compensatory and hide our disconnection to nature. They also differ in their analysis of the cause of this substitution.

              Whereas Bousé offers a technical analysis of the distorting effects produced by wildlife films (and suggests that they could potentially be overcome), the disjunction between the human and animal marking wildlife photography is identified by Berger as a by-product of the industrial revolution.[105] According to Berger, the animal’s ability to meet our gaze, its ability to challenge us with its look, disappears as animals disappear from the immediate circle of our lives.[106] Industrialization transfers the mechanization of movements first developed on animals to humans, alienating us and creating within us a nostalgia for nature in which nature is seen as a pure space, untainted by society.

According to this view of nature, the life of a wild animal becomes an ideal, an ideal internalized as a feeling surrounding a repressed desire. The image of a wild animal becomes the starting-point of a daydream: a point from which the day-dreamer departs with his back turned (14-5).

Within this conception of nature, wild animals are thought to provide a bridge to the natural in the human, to the part of the human untouched (untainted) by social forces, to an ideal state of innocence (other animals, like pets, don’t count for Berger). The wild animal is thus the figure of a desire; it represents the connection of the human to nature, conceived of as a ground of purity. This desire is repressed because its symbolic deposit, its figure, is an unrealizable engagement, one that is only presented to us in a manner that increases its distance. This distance serves to further alienate us from our experience of nature. Wildlife photography is thus part of a feedback loop in which we turn to images of animals in nature to compensate for a lack of contact with nature. These images provide us with an entry into the natural world while at the same time telling us that we are necessarily excluded from the Eden they depict. Thus for Berger, wildlife photographs provide hollow comfort for the dislocations of modernity and can only deepen our alienation.

              Berger’s argument treats the invisibility marking wildlife photographs as a symptom of the dislocations of capitalism. He explains the separation marking the images as a reflection of the separation from animals in modern Western lives. Yet Berger presumes too much in reducing animal images to an effect of industrialization and in asserting that these images can only be compensatory. As Jonathan Burt notes “Berger valorizes a view of pre-industrial practical relations with animals that are by implication pre-imagistic and unmediated by forms of representation.”[107] Berger’s argument is driven by a belief in what Burt calls “the fiction of the direct encounter (26).” Berger compares all our encounters with animals to the exchange of glances that he posits occurred between earlier humans and animals. Berger suggests that in pre-modern times in encountering look of the animal “Man becomes aware of himself returning the look. (5)” This awareness on the part of man is significant, for Berger, because “when he is being seen by the animal, he is being seen as his surroundings are seen by him.”(5) For Berger the look of the animal is uncanny and contains secrets. While language allows humans to potentially confirm each other with their looks, “No animal confirms man, either positively or negatively.” However, according to Berger, this possibility of being seen as we see the world has been extinguished in modernity by the marginalization of animals. “The look between animal and man, which may have played a crucial role in the development of human society, and with which, in any case, all men had always lived until less than a century ago, has been extinguished (28).”

As Burt argues in his extended reading of Berger’s essay, the focus on the look of the animal is “resonant of the dialectics of the gaze as found in the writings of Sartre, Levinas, and Lacan.” Drawing on this tradition, Burt notes that the gaze requires a dialectic of seeing and being seen. “One cannot have the idea of looking without the idea of being looked at in turn.” Yet, as he explains, for Berger “in the instance of humans and animals, this possibility is irretrievably ruptured.”[108] This rupture, Burt suggests, is not ultimately about the position of animals but the psychology of humans. “The thrust of the essay, which appears to be so much on the side of animals, then becomes less concerned with the welfare of animals and their mistreatment under capitalism, and much more focussed on shifts in the psychology of man’s self confirmation. (208)” In other words, Berger’s position is that humans have lost their ability to see animals because they have come to believe they are fundamentally separated from real animals and that the animals that surround them are necessarily diminished. Within Berger’s logic, as Burt notes, any representation of animals “will inevitably be considered palliative (substitutive), empty (spectral), and excessive (mass produced).”[109] Thus, Berger’s argument proves too much and the invisibility inscribed within wildlife photographs is not accounted for by a simple appeal to the representational structures of capitalism. It also follows that representations of animals do not necessarily have to render animals invisible; It may even be possible, as Steve Baker argues, for representation to render them “abrasively visible.”[110]

It will be helpful here to contrast Berger’s reading of the experience of the animal gaze, both in terms of his ideal figure of this relationship and in terms of his claim that modern subjects are unable to truly see animals, with Derrida’s reflections on the experience of the gaze of his cat.[111] In “The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” Derrida begins his exploration of the question of the animal by describing his experience of shame in being seen naked by his cat (372). He is, as Cary Wolfe suggests, ‘exposed’ before the gaze of the cat; a gaze that functions as a “limit before which we are in a profound sense interrogated and humbled.”[112] The cat, being unaware of its nudity exposes Derrida in his nakedness. The experience of the cat’s gaze puts into question both Derrida’s understanding of his own identity as human and the appropriateness of the category animal to account for the irreducible singularity of individual animals.

As Matthew Calarco explains,

To be certain of what is taking place in this particular instance requires placing one’s trust in a set of categories and concepts (self, other, human, animal) that are being called into question by the encounter. What Derrida is describing is not an encounter with the gaze of ‘an animal’ (in general), but finding oneself being seen by the uncanny gaze of a particular animal, a cat, this little female cat that, even though it is domesticated and all too familiar, nonetheless retains the capacity for challenging that familiarity.”[113] 

In this passage Calarco glosses Derrida’s insistence on the irreducibility and irreplacability of this encounter with this specific animal’s gaze. Derrida is arguing that (even) a domesticated pet can trouble our sense of self and identity and the boundaries of the human if we pay attention to the demands of its gaze. It is this irreduciblity of the animal and its gaze that I want to read against Berger’s presupposition of an animal gaze in general.[114]

In contrasting Derrida’s reading of the cat’s gaze with Berger’s arguments about animal looking, I am expanding on Calarco’s contrasting of the two positions in a footnote to his reading of Derrida. In it, he suggests that

John Berger’s well known essay ‘Why Look at Animals?’ … would have us believe that the possibility of encountering the look of another animal is for us today a near-impossibility. The look that used to occur between the human and the animal , he tells us, ‘has been extinguished. … This historic loss, to which zoos are a monument, is now irredeemable for the culture of capitalism’ (27). This might lead one to think that Derrida’s encounter with the gaze of a household cat is not a genuine encounter with the Other animal, but only with the all-too familiar animal that has ‘been co-opted into the family’ (13). (159n27)

In response to the potential denial of the reality of Derrida’s encounter, because, as a pet, for Berger the cat is not a ‘real’ animal, Calarco argues that “this animal, although seemingly familiar, ultimately shatters any attempt on Derrida’s part to conceptualize it (160n27).” In other words, the presupposition that we know what a pet is and that we know that it isn’t a real or authentic animal is precisely the kind of pre-given understanding of what has been called the animal that Derrida’s argument seeks to forestall; we cannot know beforehand the limits of our encounters with the alterity of animals. We attempt to foreclose such encounters in order to strengthen our grip on our unstable identity as human. In response to this potential caveat, Calarco suggests that “such an encounter with a domesticated animal would complicate his [Berger’s] thesis about the disappearance of animals (160 n27)” but leaves the nature of the complication unspecified.

              Taking up the question of this complication, I note that Derrida’s argument insists that respect for the otherness of animals cannot mean, despite, as he concedes, the horrors of many contemporary human-animal relations, the re-inscription of the division between human and animal or between wild (real) animals and domesticated animals as natural or given. Derrida’s argument also implies that animals can always look back; if we care to see. What this means for understanding photographs of live animals in nature is, in part, to emphasize the larger implications of the photographic blind’s separation of human looking and the gaze of animals beyond its role as an instrumental technology for producing certain kinds of images. It points to the way the photographic blind participates in what Agamben has called the anthropological machine.[115] As Kari Weil explains, “Agamben uses the term the anthropological machine to refer to the process whereby the ‘human’ is defined through opposition to or exclusion of what is nonhuman or animal.”[116] In other words, the blind’s inscription of a separation between human and animal is not an unprecedented assertion of a nature culture split but rather is part of a long tradition of asserting human identity in opposition to animals and nature. Placing animal photography within this tradition raises the question that Weil argues confronts all animal representations “Do we in fact see ‘the animal’ rather than an animal? (26)” To begin to answer this question, we need to more forcefully examine the question of the photographic invisibility marking wildlife photography.

Animal Photography and Photographic Invisibility

As the above argument makes clear, the invisibility that Berger has identified as marking wildlife photographs requires an historical and technical explanation rather than an ideological explanation. I have provided an historical account of the development of the photographic blind and its production of invisibility. However, it is also necessary to clarify exactly what the normal invisibility in wildlife photographs is and how it operates. It is necessary to distinguish the specificity of the invisibility marking wildlife photography from the general operations of photography. For example, instantaneous photography depicts frozen moments of movement that are not visible to the naked eye, which are, we might say, normally ‘invisible.’ A snapshot photograph’s representation of something that declares itself to be unseeable disrupts our ability to trust our own experience. Like in wildlife photography, the use of the photographic apparatus to access an otherwise inaccessible reality increases our dependence on the apparatus and our alienation from our experience. This is a point Joel Snyder brings to the fore in his discussion of Benjamin’s essay “The Work Of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Snyder asks, “If photographs are about ‘the visible world’ and most writers on photography maintain at least this, then in what sense is a picture that shows us something unseeable still to be thought of as about ‘the visible world?’” [117] He suggests that instantaneous photography challenges our understanding of reality by leaving us “in the unusual predicament of maintaining at one and the same time photographs show us facts about ‘the visible world’ that have no counterparts in our world outside their occurrence in photographs (161).” As Snyder points out, there is a gap between what is visible in instantaneous photographs and what is visible in the world. This gap is resolved by having the photograph become the lens through which we understand the visibility of the world. Instantaneous photography described presents us with images of the world that we cannot physically see.

              This aspect of photography is central to the history of animal photography; the connection begins with Eadweard Muybridge’s famous photographs of the horse in motion. At the request of railroader Leland Stanford, Muybridge sought to determine photographically whether horses ever had all four feet off the ground. He built a battery of cameras at Stanford’s Palo Alto racetrack that could be triggered in rapid succession capturing the sequence of movements comprising the horse’s gait. The resulting images, published in 1878 as The Horse in Motion, conclusively demonstrated that the horse’s feet do indeed leave the ground while moving. (Figure 17) The 12 images in Muybridge’s grid show the outline of the horse and rider against a lined and numbered backdrop. The pictures decompose the movements of the horse into a series of frozen moments revealing that a certain points in its gallop the horse tucks all of its legs up underneath itself. The twelfth image depicts the horse and rider at rest against the backdrop. In revealing the otherwise invisible aspects of the horse’s motion, the images also flatly contradicted the traditional manner of representing a horse in motion, the spread-legged figure of the hobby horse.[118] After Muybridge, we no longer see the traditional spread-legged horse figure as an adequate representation of movement and instead see it as unsophisticated and unrealistic.

              As Snyder argues,

It is not only that these pictures may represent what we cannot see, but finally, they provide testimony for us, as we cannot for ourselves, of what we actually do see -- they authorize us to make claims about what we see right in front of our eyes -- and finally educate us about how we ought to judge what we see. Chronophotographs then, can bring us into a domain we cannot see; yet at the same time, they can also show us what we do see, though we cannot warrant having seen apart from the pictorial evidence produced by precision instruments.[119]

The movement of the horse’s legs is something we cannot see for ourselves because our eyes cannot focus fast enough.[120] Instead, we take Muybridge’s images as showing us what we would see if we could resolve the movement into its component parts. Any evidence our sight offers us that contradicts the apparatus is dismissed as optical illusion.[121] The images disrupt our relation to the visible world, convincing us that the truth of the visible world is not what we see, it is what the apparatus shows us. Muybridge’s photographs were the first instances of what Étienne-Jules Marey would come to call chronophotography; the sequential depiction of movement. Yet, as Snyder argues in relation to Marey’s discussion of Muybridge’s chronophotography and its effect on art,

The education of sight, as elaborated by Marey, involves a process of reconciliation between what we see and what we can only come to know through chronophotography. We cannot be taught to see what we cannot see, but we can learn to expect artists to represent ‘Nature’ without mistakes, and the standard of correctness is set by chronophotographic discoveries.[122]

Chronophotography, like The Horse in Motion, presents images marked by their normal invisibility that we take as a standard for our engagement with reality and its representations.[123] This is similar to the effects of wildlife photography described by Berger, yet it differs in one key aspect; Muybridge’s images are not predicated on our absence. We cannot see the movement of the horse’s legs with the naked eye and in fact that inability was the impetus for their production. However, we believe that the truth of the movement these photographs depict was always there for us to see. This is in sharp contrast to the relation between visibility and invisibility in wildlife photography. The animals in wildlife photography can physically be seen by the naked eye and almost all of them are available to be seen in zoos.[124] The ‘normal invisibility’ marking wildlife photography suggests that the real animal is ontologically, and hence optically, inaccessible to us. According to the logic of the wildlife photograph the real animal is not the one we see. The logic of the images is as follows: when we are there the animal behaves in an unnatural way or refuses to appear; when we are not there the animal is both natural and visible. Thus, we could not see what the images show us, not because the apparatus extends beyond the capabilities of our sight, as in chronophotography, but, because the apparatus stands in for us in a situation in which we ourselves can not be.

              The animals in wildlife photography assert their authenticity on the basis of a radical detachment between human and animal. They thus depict the animals represented as figures of the animal and as representatives of species being rather than as individual animals that may be encountered. Unlike Berger, I am not arguing that this separation is a simply a symptom of capitalism, instead, following Derrida I insist that contemporary humans are capable of having meaningful encounters with animals. My argument is that photography has shaped the way we see and think animals. The key is the link between the production of animal images and the production of normal invisibility. The apparatus that produces both is the photographic blind. The photographic blind produces animal images by hiding the photographer and inscribing the resulting images of animals with a conceptual separation from humanity. It is a machine for controlling the relation between seeing and being seen. However, this function of the photographic blind depends on its historical constitution. Although the photographic blind naturalizes itself and the images it produces, its function is historically constructed.

Conclusion: The Naturalization of the Photographic Blind

              As we have seen, the photographic blind is a key apparatus used in the production of wildlife photographs. An enclosure that allows seeing (and documenting) without being seen, the photographic blind allows photographers to take candid shots of wild animals in their natural habitat. The blind is a technology of representation that has become tied to the development and articulation of wildlife photography as a genre. However, the blind, like the images it helps produce, has been naturalized; it is not generally understood as a technology of representation but rather as a commonsense solution to a simple problem. To borrow a term from science studies, the photographic blind has been black boxed. It is not presented as an achievement but as a commonsense solution to a simple problem. For this reason, its functions have not generally been examined. Commentators discuss the photographic blind as if its workings were both self-evident and natural.[125] For example, in the context of a short history of nature photography, Edmund White presents a brief account of the photographic blind’s development. According to White,

Modern nature photographers know that birds are shy of strange movement but will continue their normal activity if human beings are out of sight, inside a canvas blind. Earlier photographers, however, felt they had to hide in fake trees or under piles of hay.[126]

White argues that the photographic blind lets us see the ‘normal’ activity of birds. Because birds are ‘shy,’ we need to be hidden in order to really see them. The implication is that without the photographic blind the animals we see will be somehow tainted, abnormal, or invisible. As White’s formulation suggests, the photographic blind is a key site in the production and maintenance of the modern understanding of the ‘normal’ animal. To understand how the blind has come to be understood as producing images of normal animals it is necessary to analyze both the function and history of the blind.

              Modern photographers, per White, understand that the simple canvas tent--a blank space within the landscape--is enough to allow wildlife photography. As White’s description indicates, the ideal figure of the modern photographic blind is a plain canvas tent in which photographers and scientists can spend long hours observing and documenting wild animals.[127] However, it also suggests that in contrast to modern photographers early photographers did too much with their photographic blinds; they felt they had to hide in the landscape by mimicking some feature of it.

              White’s description presents a trajectory for the photographic blind from its appearing as something specific in the landscape to its appearing as something abstract. Appearing as something else is refined to simply not appearing human. Yet, his description minimizes and obscures the history of the photographic blind. It minimizes the work that was necessary to get from fake trees to canvas tents and erases the work required to invent fake trees. It also obscures the connection between photographic blinds and hunting blinds. The photographic blind is not reducible to the specific configuration of the canvas tent in the woods. Rather, the photographic blind is a set of practices and principles governing the disposition and use of an apparatus.

              Reduced to its mechanics, the photographic blind is an enclosed structure that enables its occupants to observe and document the world without being observed. This erasure, or ‘invisibility,’ of the observer came to be marked as a means of producing ‘objective’ images and observations. The photographic blind is a machine for viewing and producing images of animals in a specific way. The resulting images are considered candid because the blind assures us that the animals being photographed are unaware of the image’s taking. It hides the observer from the observed providing images of animals untainted by human contact. The photographic blind provides images of the private lives of animals by allowing us to read the images it produces as if neither we nor the photographer were there. In doing so, the images provide visual confirmation of the main tenets of wildlife photography. Because of this, I argue that the photographic blind is both a central technique and a central trope of wildlife photography. The photographic blind produces images of ‘the heart of nature,’ images of wild animals behaving 'authentically'--as they behave with no humans present. Yet, in making nature available to us, these images are at the same time asserting a separation between us and nature by suggesting that the only ‘real’ animals are wild animals--animals untainted by human contact.

              The photographic blind emerged from the hunting blind via its adoption by camera hunting. It was initially one technique among many for taking photographs of live animals in their natural habitats. As photographers adapted the blind to animal photography, it opened up new possibilities for seeing and documenting animals. The enclosure of the blind came to be understood as marking a conceptual separation between the photographer and the natural world. This separation altered the relation to the animal figured by animal photography. The animals represented were no longer available to the viewer as a potential conquest. Instead, the images offered unprecedented access to the private lives of animals. Yet, the price for this access was images that assert that the rest of our interactions with animals are necessarily partial or false. Contra Berger, it was not industrialization that made human animal relations impossible. It was wildlife photography that convinced us that traditional methods of representing and relating to animals were not up to its standard. The wildlife photograph, the taking of which provides evidence of and access to a privileged connection to nature, alters our understanding and experience of nature. In other words, the photographic blind is designed to fool animals and obscure human presence yet the viewer also gets caught in the apparatus set out to capture the animal. However, by paying attention to the history of the photographic blind and the structures of its rhetoric, it may also be possible to denaturalize wildlife photography and the operations of the blind and thereby begin to take up the ethical challenge posed by the look of animals. Perhaps rather than understanding the blind as conveying invisibility and thereby foreclosing the possibility of meeting an animal’s gaze, we might rethink the use of the blind by revisiting Chapman’s image Blind on Beach. (Figure 16) The exposed and highly visible blind might be better understood as conveying immobility and non-hostility rather than invisibility. Understanding the blind’s operation through this lens would leave open the possibility that the animals captured by the apparatus may still be able to look back.

[1] Margaret Harker, “Animal Photography in the Nineteenth Century,” in Alexandra Noble ed., The Animal in Photography, 1893-1945 (London: The Photographers’Gallery, 1985): 24-35 and Charles Albert Walker Guggisberg, Early Animal Photographers, London: David and Charles, 1977.

[2] Jonathan Burt, “The Wheel of Nature: animals in early films from the Lumière Brothers to Charles Urban’s ‘Evolution,’” Representing Animals, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, April 13-15, 2000. See also Burt, Animals in Film, London: Reaktion Books, 2002.

[3] Rebecca Solnit. River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, New York: Penguin, 2003; Marta Braun, Eadweard Muybridge, London: Reaktion Books, 2010.

[4] Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904), Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1992.

[5] Focal Plane shutters allowed exposure times of 1/100th of a second. Deac Rossell, Ottomar Anshütz and his Electrical Wonder, London: The Projection Box, 1997.

[6] Fast lenses allowed a larger amount of light through the aperture enabling shorter exposures. Dry plate films replaced the wet-collodion process which used glass plates for negatives and required the plate to be developed before the emulsion dried.

[7] Jacklighting occurred at night and used a lantern to take advantage of nocturnal animals’ fascination with lights. Tripwires were used on game trails and around bait to automatically photograph animals. Photographers would also chase animals with dogs until they were brought to bay so that they could photograph them. They also often shot the animals after photographing them.

[8] See Matthew Brower, Developing Animals: Early American Animal Photography, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Matthew Brower, “Trophy Shots: Early North American Non-Human Animal Photography and the Display of Masculine Prowess,” Society and Animals, 13.1, 13-32; James Ryan, “‘Hunting with the Camera:’ Photography, Wildlife and Colonialism in Africa,” in Animal Spaces, Beastly Places, eds. Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert (London: Routledge, 2000): 203-221; and Finis Dunaway, “Hunting with the Camera: Nature Photography, Manliness, and Modern Memory, 1890–1930,” Journal of American Studies, 34 (2000): 207-230

[9] The development of half-tone reproduction processes in the late 1880s allowed the economical integration of photographs and text for the first time. This made photographs reproducible in a new way and sparked a revolution in photographically illustrated publications.

[10] This is process has been automated. Hunters can purchase electronic calling systems that digitally reproduce animal calls.

[11] The two functions have now merged in the Canada Goose Recliner goose blind from Wildfowler Outfitters: the hunter lies inside a goose shell that flips open to allow them fire.

[12] Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy (New York: Zone Books, 1996), 178.

[13] Blind is the late-nineteenth century term. Prior to blind the term hide was used which has its roots in Middle English.

[14] Cherry Kearton, Grouse Shooter In Butt, in Richard Kearton, With Nature and a Camera Being the Adventures and Observations of a Field Naturalist & an Animal Photographer (London: Cassel, 1898), 165.

[15] R. Kearton, With Nature and a Camera. The brothers collaborated on the book with Cherry doing the photography and Richard writing the text.

[16] On the Keartons see William R. Mitchell, Watch the Birdie (Settle: Casstleberg, 2001).

[17] Richard Kearton, British Birds’ Nests--How, Where and When to Find and Identify Them, illus. Cherry Kearton (London: Cassel, 1895).

[18] The brothers achieved a good deal of renown for their efforts. Richard was a fellow of the Royal Zoological Society and the Royal Geographical society offers the Cherry Kearton Medal for excellence in nature photography. Cherry became a pioneering wildlife filmmaker and filmed his friend Teddy Roosevelt on Safari in Africa. Cherry Kearton, Wild Life Across the World (London: Hodder and Stoughton, c. 1920s)

[19] The presence of the photographer outside the blind indicates that the photograph is posed.

[20] Or, more accurately, is probably posed as if he were loading the gun. The first man is not firing, thus it is unlikely that the second gun is in fact empty and in need of loading. This suggests that what we see in the image is a posed portrait illustrating the idealized mechanics of the blind. The presence of the photographer, outside the blind, strongly supports this reading.

[21] On the relation between photographs and captions see Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998): 15-31.

[22] Repeating shotguns were not in use at the time.

[23] See David Quammen, “The Bear Slayer,” Atlantic Monthly, 292, no. 1 (July-August 2003): 45-64 on Nicolae Ceaucescu’s hunting practice for a description of how luxurious blinds can become. “Another feature of the typical station is an elevated blind within eyeshot of the trough, from which the gamekeeper does his observing. In some cases this is a simple platform of planks about ten feet off the ground, like a child’s tree house though not quite so graceful; in others it’s an enclosed structure on sturdy pilings. If the blind is also used as a shooting position, it’s known as a high seat. A high seat may be spartan or comfortable; at the comfortable extreme it’s essentially a two-room cabin, furnished with cots, a wood stove, a window overlooking the target area (about fifty yards away), a firewood bin, a toilet, and maybe a bottle or two of vodka. Under such circumstances a bear hunter is not put to great inconvenience or challenge, let alone risk.” Ibid., 52.

[24] Limited biographical information is available on Mary Wallihan. Viola S. Schantz suggests that “Perhaps for obvious feminine reasons her birthdate is omitted” from the biographical descriptions in their first book. Viola S. Schanz, “Mrs. Wallihan A Pioneer Photographer of Wildlife,” Journal of Mammalogy, 26, no. 2 (May, 1945): 133-135.

[25] The Wallihans won a diploma for their photography at the Paris exposition in 1900 and a bronze medal in St. Louis in 1904.

[26] Wallihan and Wallihan, Hoofs, Claws and Antlers of the Rocky Mountains (Denver: Thayer, 1902). The second edition of the book, published in 1902, included a brief introduction by Buffalo Bill.

[27] While the Wallihans took the majority of the photographs in the text, the book also included images taken by other photographers to round out the range of species represented.

[28] Wallihan and Wallihan, Hoofs, Claws and Antlers, unpaginated.

[29] Wallihan Wallihan, Hoofs Claws and Antlers.

[30] Text for “antelope plate no 3” Ibid., unpaginated.

[31] Mr. Wallihan also provides another description of buck fever while waiting in the blind. “Next day I was back at the blind early and several came in but not near me. Thinking I heard a splashing above me I peered over the bank and saw a few had come in there to water. They soon worked my way and aiming the camera as near right to where they would come, I waited, while my fever rose as I heard them splashing along. Imagine if you can of being within thirty feet of this most wary of game animals as I was when those walked out to where you see them. Could you control your nerves? I cannot and I have been amongst them twelve years. Nor have I seen the person who could not withstanding their boasting that they never have buck fever.” Ibid., unpaginated.

[32] Ibid., unpaginated.

[33] Ibid., unpaginated.

[34] The Wallihans’ blinds were not always clearly described and were sometimes of undetermined construction.

[35] Text for “Deer plate no 17” Ibid., unpaginated.

[36] “If, later in the nineteenth century, cinema or photography seem to invite formal comparison with the camera obscura, it is within a social, cultural, and scientific milieu where there had already been a profound break with the conditions of vision presupposed by this device.” Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 27.

[37] “First of all the camera obscura performs an operation of individuation; that is, necessarily defines an observer as isolated, enclosed, and autonomous within its dark confines. It impels a kind of askesis, or withdrawal from the world, in order to regulate and purify one’s relation to the manifold contents of the now “exterior” world. Thus the camera obscura is inseparable from a certain metaphysics of interiority: it is a figure for both the observer who is nominally a free sovereign individual and a privatized subject confined in a quasi-domestic space, cut off from a public exterior world.” Ibid., 39.

[38]The Keartons were also among the first to describe their animal photography as wildlife photography.

[39] Richard Kearton, Wildlife at Home How to Study and Photograph It, illus. Cherry Kearton (London: Cassell and Company, 1899), 9-10.

[40] Jennifer Tucker “Photography as Witness, Detective, and Impostor: Visual Representation in Victorian Science,” in Victorian Science In Context, ed. Bernard Lightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997): 378-408, 380-1

[41] On the production of photographic objectivity during the late-nineteenth century see also John Tagg, The Burden of Representation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988).

[42] Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations, 40 (Fall 1992): 81-128, 112. See also Peter Galison, “Judgment Against Objectivity,” in Picturing Science, Producing Art, eds. Peter Galison and Caroline A. Jones (London: Routledge, 1998): 327-359.

[43] Daston and Galison, “Image of Objectivity,” 112.

[44] Cherry Kearton, Photographing King Fisher in R. Kearton With Nature And A Camera, 353.

[45] In this separation from the photographer’s viewpoint, the set up is similar to the set-camera photography pioneered by Shiras and discussed in the previous chapter. It differs from the set camera, though, in that the set camera, as practiced by Shiras, emphasized the contact between animal and camera even if the camera was not directly linked to the eye of the photographer.

[46] W. J. T. Mitchell, “Illusion: Looking at Animals Looking,” in Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994): 329-344.

[47] R. Kearton, Wildlife at Home.

[48] Cherry Kearton, Artificial Rubbish Heap in R. Kearton, Wildlife At Home, 15.

[49] R. Kearton, Wildlife at Home, 10.

[50] Cherry Kearton, Artificial Tree Trunk Open in R. Kearton, Wildlife At Home, 12.

[51] Cherry Kearton, Artificial Tree Trunk Closed in R. Kearton, Wildlife At Home, 13.

[52] Richard describes the tree trunk’s construction in Richard Kearton, “Photographing Shy Wild Birds and Beasts at Home,” Bird-Lore, 1, no. 4 (August 1899): 107-112, 110.

[53] For biographical information on Herrick see Winfred George Leutner, “Francis Hobart Herrick,” Science, 92, no. 2391 (October 25, 1940): 371-2. Francis Hobart Herrick, The American Lobster: A Study of Its Habits and Development (Washington, DC: Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission, Vol. 15, 1895).

[54] Francis Hobart Herrick, Audubon the Naturalist, A History of His Life and Time (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1917); Francis Hobart Herrick, The American Eagle: A Study in Natural and Civil History (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1934).

[55] Guggisberg, Early Wildlife Photographers, 31.

[56] Alfred O. Gross, “History and Progress of Bird Photography in America,” in Fifty Years Progress of American Ornithology, 1883-1933, eds. Frank M. Chapman and Theodore S. Palmer (Lancaster: American Ornithological Union, 1933): 159-80, 163.

[57] Francis H. Herrick, “A New Method of Bird Study and Photography,” The Critic, 38 (May 1901): 425-30. The article reproduces the preface to his The Home Life of Wild Birds (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1901). Herrick later represented his arguments in “The Wild Bird by a New Approach,” The Century Magazine, 66 (October 1903) 858-868.

[58] Herrick, “Wild Bird,” 860.

[59] Herrick, “New Method,” 425.

[60] Ibid., 426.

[61] Ibid., 427.

[62] Ibid., 429.

[63] Ibid., 425-6.

[64] “This sudden displacement of the nesting bough is of no special importance to either old or young, provided certain precautions are taken. It is as if an apartment or living room were removed from the fourth story of some human abode to the ground floor, or in the case of the ground-building birds as if the first story were raised to a level with the second. The immediate surroundings of the nest remain the same in any case. The nest might indeed be taken from its bough or from the sward, but this would be inadvisable, chiefly because it would destroy the natural site or the exact conditions selected and in some measure determined by the birds themselves.” Ibid., 426-7.

[65] More accurately: Because the blind is thought to make our presence unobservable to the birds, the photos are taken as showing us the birds acting as if we weren’t there (because for us we aren’t).

[66] On the professionalization of American Ornithology see Mark V. Barrow, A Passion for the Birds: American Ornithology after Audubon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

[67] Gross, “History and Progress,” 166.

[68] For Daston and Galison mechanical objectivity is a moralized noninterventionism that came to characterize scientific representation in the late-nineteenth century. Daston and Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” 82.

[69] For biographical information on Chapman see Robert Cushman Murray, “Frank Michler Chapman, 1864-1945,” The Auk, 67, no. 3 (July-September 1950): 307-315. Barrow, For The Birds, 103-4. Frank Michler Chapman, Camps and Cruises of an Ornithologist (New York: D. Appleton, 1908). Frank Michler Chapman, Autobiography of a Bird Lover (New York: D. Appleton, 1933).

[70] Karen Wonders, Habitat Dioramas: Illusions of Wilderness in Museums of Natural History (Upsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1993).

[71] Frank Michler Chapman, Bird Studies with a Camera (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1900).

[72] Frank Michler Chapman, “The Use of a Blind in the Study of Bird-Life,” Bird-Lore, 10 (September-October 1908): 250-252, 252.

[73] On Thayer’s theories of countershading see Stephen .Jay Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus, (London: Penguin, 1991) and Sharon Kingsland, “Abbott Thayer and the Protective Coloration Debate,” Journal of the History of Biology, 11 (1978): 223–244.

[74] Gross, “History and Progress,” 165.

[75] Frank Michler Chapman, “The Fish Hawks of Gardiner’s Island,” Bird-Lore, 10 (July-August 1908): 153-159.

[76] Helen MacDonald, “Covert Naturalists or How Ethologists Hunt for Objectivity,” paper presented at The Practice of Objectivity in the Natural and Social Sciences, the CPNSS/Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, London School of Economics, October 8-9, 2003..

[77] Chapman, Camps and Cruises, xv.

[78] J. Maclain Boraston, “Hunting With A Camera,” The Cosmopolitan, 39, (May 1905): 43.

[79] The Nation, “Photography of the Wild,” Review of Reviews (November 20, 1909): 484-486, 485.

[80] The telephoto lens was introduced in 1892.

[81] http://www.kirkphoto.com/N-visi_Bag_portable_photo_blind.html. Accessed December 27, 2011.

[82] http://www.naturescapes.net/store/kwik-camo_photography-blind.html. Accessed December 27, 2011.

[83] http://www.canadiannaturephotographer.com/waynelynch.html.  Accessed December 27, 2011.

[84] http://www.fws.gov/klamathbasinrefuges/photoblind.html. Accessed December 27, 2011.

[85] http://www.nanpa.org/blinds.php. Accessed December 27, 2011.

[86]  See, for example, the Texas photo blind blog for a list of public and private photo blinds in Texas. http://txphotoblinds.blogspot.com. Accessed December 27, 2011.

[87] For example, In Nebraska, blinds for watching Sandhill Crane migrations rent for 200 dollars a night.http://www.rowesanctuary.org/photo%20blinds.htm, Accessed December 27, 2011.

[88] Deborah Ritchie Oberbillig, “A Guide to Wildlife Viewing and Photography Blinds,” Colorado Division of Wildlife/Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, 2006, p. 6. http://www.dgif.virginia.gov/wildlifewatching/tech-assistance.asp

[89] Ibid, p. 5.

[90] Matthew Brower, “‘Take Only Photographs’: Animal Photography’s Production of Nature Love,” Invisible Culture, 9. 2005. www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture. Accesed December 30, 2011.

[91] For the history of the development of wildlife film and television see Cynthia Chris, Watching Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

[92] For examples of wildlife webcams see: http://www.wildcam.com/live/wildcam3/index.html. Accessed December 30, 2011.

[93]For the crittercam homepage see: http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/crittercam/. Accessed December 30, 2011. For a discussion of the theoretical implications of crittercam for human-animal relations see Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

[94] “Inventing a Beast with No Body: Radio-telemetry, the Simulation of Ecology, and the Marginalization of Animals.” Worldviews 9.2 (2005): 255-70. For an example of the continued use of blinds in wildlife biology see the Atlantic Laboratory for Avian Research’s report on “Machias Seal Island

Long-Term Seabird Research and Monitoring,” http://www.unb.ca/acwern/msi/studymethods.htm. Accessed December 30, 2011.

[95] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 202.

[96] Here it is important to recall Mitchell’s contention that the fooling of animals also function as an assertion of human mastery.

[97] John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?”, in About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1980): 3-28. For an extended reading of Berger’s text that situates it in relation to animal studies see Jonathan Burt, “John Berger’s ‘Why Look at Animals?’: A Close Reading,” Worldviews, 2005, 9.2, pp. 203-218.

[98] Berger uses an example of high-speed animal photography as producing an ideological invisibility. Berger, “Why Look at Animals?,” 16.

[99] For an extended analysis of the fundamental exclusion of the human body from wildlife imagery and the erasure of entry points from which one can situate oneself in relation to the image see Matthew Brower, “Robert Bateman’s Natural Worlds,” Journal of Canadian Studies, 33, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 66-77.

[100] Editors of Time-Life Books, “Introduction,” Photographing Nature (New York: Time-Life Books, 1971), 7.

[101] Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” in The Haraway Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004), 7-45.

[102] The logic of animal imagery discussed by Berger parallels the logic of the spectacle articulated by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Fredy Perlman and John Supak (Detroit: Red and Black, 1977).

[103] Derek Bousé, “False Intimacy: Close-ups and Viewer Involvement in Wildlife Film,” Visual Studies, 18, no. 2 (Spring 2003):123-32.

[104] A Para-proxemic relationship is a form of para-social relationship in which the viewer believes themselves to be intimately acquainted with media representations. The term was formulated to describe the intense one-sided relationship viewers formed with media figures on television. See Donald Horton and Richard Wohl,. ‘‘Mass communication and para-social interaction: observations on intimacy at a distance,’’ Psychiatry, 19 (1965):215–229.

[105] Berger, “Why Look at Animals?”, 1.

[106] Ibid., 3

[107] Burt, Animals in Film, 26.

[108] Burt, “John Berger’s ‘Why Look at Animals?,” 205.

[109] Burt, Animals in Film, 26.

[110] Steve Baker, the Post Modern Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 62.

[111] Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” trans., David Wills, Critical Inquiry, 28, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 369-418.

[112]  Cary Wolfe, “Introduction: Exposure,” in Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking, and Cary Wolfe, Philosophy and animal Life, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 1-41, 36.

[113] Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 124.

[114] Calarco argues that Derrida’s essay is founded on its encounter with “this particular ‘cat’ as an absolutely unique and irreplaceable entity, one whose uncanny gaze cannot find its substitute in the gaze of another animal.” (124)The gaze of the cat cannot be substituted, not because this effect can only be produced by this one cat but because the experience emerges from paying attention to the animal in its irreducible singularity.

[115] Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

[116] Kari Weil, Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 43.

[117] Joel Snyder, “Benjamin on Reproducibility and Aura: A Reading of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility,’” in Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed. Gary Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989): 158-174, 161.

[118] Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 138-140.

[119] Joel Snyder, “Visualization and Visibility,” in Picturing Science, Producing Art eds. Peter Galison and Caroline A. Jones (London: Routledge, 1998): 379-397, 394.

[120] This inability to focus at high speeds is what allows us to reconstitute the individual images produced by Muybridge back into the appearance of fluid motion when the images are shown in rapid succession.

[121] Crary, Suspensions of Perception. On the generalized phenomena of displacing the evidence of the senses for the results of the apparatus see Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).

[122] Snyder, “Visualization and Visibility,” 395.

[123] Cf. Beaumont Newhall who suggests, “The evidence which instantaneous photography presented about the attitudes of men and animals in motion became assimilated by the public, through the sheer number of example presented to them. Beaumont Newhall, “Photography and the Development of Kinetic Visualization,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 7 (1944): 40-45, 45.

[124] Berger insists that animals in zoos cannot really be seen as they cannot look back at us. I take Derrida’s argument as indicating that it is in fact an ethical necessity that, despite the difficulties of zoos, we acknowledge the possibility of animals in zoos looking back at us.

[125] C. A. W. Guggisberg briefly discusses the blind in his Early Wildlife Photographers. However, his only reflection on the blind’s workings is to wonder why birds are not disturbed by the presence of “the strange canvas structure which, one would have thought, should have appeared to them as a very disturbing blot in the landscape.” Ibid., 31.

[126] Edmund White, “Animals, Vegetables and Minerals: the Lure and Lore of Nature Photography,” in Photographing Nature (New York: Time-Life Books, 1971): 13-16, 16.

[127] Ethologists distinguish between “observing” and “watching” animals. Observation is the focused disciplined looking done by trained professionals while watching is the at best semi-trained activity of the general public. For an informative discussion of ethologists and their practices in blinds as they relate to scientific objectivity see MacDonald, “Covert Naturalists”