Three white-tailed deer on the run in one of the first pictures of animals at night with flash ever taken.
Some time ago, the archivist of National Geographic Bill Bonner showed me a beautiful book, In the Heart of the Dark Night , dedicated to the work of photographer George Shiras. Since I work just as photo editors of the magazine, I was ignorant of the work Shiras. Often considered one of the fathers of nature photography, Shiras began photographing in 1889, and was the first to use camera traps and the flash on animals.
1906 National Geographic published a full 74 pictures Shiras, who in 1928 donated 2,400 negative plate of the Society. Slabs that are still in our store.
The book In the Heart of the Dark Night (and the eponymous exhibition currently being held in Paris) was edited and edited by Sonia Voss, who came to our office in Washington to select the archive photo with Bonner. National Geographic was involved in the original scan of the glass plates, which were never scanned.
Some of these plates date back to 1897 and were damaged and scratched. The photo lab La Chambre Noire Paris remodeled damaged pictures using traditional darkroom techniques.
“When I found photos of Shiras, I was struck by their beauty and their mysterious patina”, he recently wrote Voss in an interview via e-mail. “But over Beyond the element of poetry that these photos give off, there is also something more. Their experimental nature and at the same time committed distinguishes them from other images of foptografi and painters of the nineteenth century, depicting nature in nostalgic and idealized form, authentic and virgin. “
George Shiras was born in 1859 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and as a young man had a great passion for hunting. When he began photographing nature worked was a lawyer and a politician, but decided to devote his life to portray animals in Michigan and the surrounding Lake Superior. He became a staunch champion of environmentalism and contributed to the creation of several protected areas and national parks.
To take photos at night, Shiras used a hunting technique learned from the Ojibwa Indian tribe, the jacklighting , in which a fire is lit in a pan and put it on the tip of a canoe, with the hunter placed behind.
“The glow to distinguish the animal, it locks, as if hypnotized by the flame,” says Voss. “The Hunter, which is located in the shadows at the back of the canoe, it has to do is shoot between the animal’s eyes, which reflect the flames and stand out like beacons in the night. In the photographic version, the fire is replaced by a kerosene lamp and the trigger of the gun from the shutter button. ”
In order to photograph the animals away from the shore, Shiras built the camera traps with rope or twine which, if touched, did not trigger the flash and the camera shutter by a complex system of ropes developed by the same Shiras, calling him flashlight trapping . “At the time, the use of flash photography was still a novelty, and it came through the ignition and espolsione of magnesium powder,” says Voss. “We can only imagine what kind of detonation unleashed this explosion, accompanied by an intense glow, like a ball of fire”.
“To Shiras,” says Voss, “Photography, thanks to recent technological developments , it was an indispensable means to conquer the unknown and attest to the beauty of a world at risk. The way he saw the photograph not only from an aesthetic point of view but also as a means to document the nature and form a new relationship with it is of great historical importance and has paved the way for the long history of nature photography “.
The show George Shiras, In the Heart of the Dark Night is visible at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris until February 14, 2016.
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