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specialist H. Pointer in England in the 1860s–1870s and
melodramatic ‘perils of the wilderness’ 1890s stereo-
graphs in America by George Barker (1844–1894).
A substantial market developed in the 1860s for
animal studies called études for use by artists and de-
signers. One of the main publishers from the 1860s on
was the Alsatian fi rm of Adolphe Braun (1812–1877) in
Mulhouse which released many series on rural animals
as well as and giant carbon prints of still-life studies of
dead game. Achille Quinet (1831–1900) and Constant
Famin (in France (1827–1888) produced picturesque
farm animal studies and one of the most prolifi c animal
specialists Charles Reid (1837–1929) in Scotland the
1880s, undertook extensive journeys to add types of
animals to his inventory.
The ability to capture more than what the eye could
see awaited the development of the dry-collodion plate
in the 1870s and technical innovations in lenses and
shutter mechanisms into the early 1880s. The great
pioneers were Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) in Paris
from the 1860s and British-born Eadweard Muybridge
(1830–1904) in California in the 1870s and 1880s. In
1878 Muybridge used fast Dallmeyer lenses and a line
of cameras with trip wires to prove a horse’s legs left
the ground while at full gallop. Muybridge developed
his zoopraxiscope an early form of cinematography
which Marey saw in Paris and developed his pistol
camera and sequential chronophotography process


making some of the most beautiful and scientifi cally
precise images of bird fl ight. Others including German
Ottomar Anschütz (1846–1907) took up the new animal
locomotion methods and designed his own rapid shutter
and became a pioneer of cinematographic apparatus. In
1884 he published a sequential shots of a stork leaving
its nest and over the next two years undertook hundreds
studies of animals in the Posen Zoo and a private deer
park. Using a hide and a race to confi ne the animals
and possibly fake scenic backdrops, Anschütz’s close-
ups gave a powerful illusion of animals in the wild. At
the same time in Paris Louis-Jean Delton’s son Jean II
(1850–after1917) trading as J. Delton, used the new
rapid gelatin bromide dry-plate negatives to make ‘in-
stantaneous’ photographs showing horses rearing and
jumping. He published a series of albums of photogra-
vures and platinum prints of riders in action in the Bois
de Boulogne from 1882 and took one of if not the fi rst,
in situ race-fi nish photographs in 1885. In 1917 Delton
II claimed to have been the fi rst in Europe to capture
horses in movement and had letters from pioneers like
Marey attesting to his success.
In 1887 Muybridge having renewed his earlier experi-
ments utilising an electro-magnetic device to trigger the
shutters on his banks of cameras and made hundreds of
animal movement studies, some of which were made
at the Philadelphia Zoo and Gentlemen’s Driving Park.
The work was published in eleven volumes of collotypes

Juan de Borbon, Count de
Montizon. The Hippopotamus at
the Zoological Gardens, Regent.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Gilman Collection, Purchase, Ann
Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee
GIft, 2005 (2005, 100.14) © The
Metropolitan Museum of Art.

ANIMAL AND ZOOLOGICAL PHOTOGRAPHY

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