Wildlife Photography Session, 1950s

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Wildlife Photography Session, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Wildlife Photography Session, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-A1B210

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A wildlife photographer has placed a twin-lens reflex camera on the ground and trained it on a small ground-dwelling mammal, probably a ground squirrel or prairie dog, which approaches the apparatus with the casual indifference of an animal that has not yet learned to fear human machines. The photographer's theory—evident in the brown leather strap and the deliberate positioning—was that by leaving the camera unattended at ground level, the subject would reveal itself in its natural state, unaware of observation. This was the optimistic assumption of mid-century nature photography: that presence itself could be engineered away, that a machine left in the dirt would become invisible to the thing it meant to capture. The animal has already rendered the plan obsolete by noticing the camera before the shutter could fire, which is precisely what happens when you put expensive precision optics in the path of a creature whose survival depends on noticing hard objects on the ground.

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