The Trophy, Animals & Photography

Earlier I wrote a blog entry titled “It was cold shooting animals!” I liked telling people that I was going to go shoot animals because of the double meaning. It felt okay to say it because I was not killing any animal. Then reading Mathew Brower’s book “Developing Animals: Wildlife and Early American Photography,” made me realize how we often use words without knowing the history of it. Who knew that the word shooting in photography does actually have a relation to hunting and the gun? And the word shooting is not the only one, also the words capturing, point and shoot and snap are a few others that filtered from the hunting vocabulary into photography. In the turn of the 20th century, the sport of photographing animals in the wild was trying to be equivalent to the hunting sport because it required the same set of skills: understanding how to track the animal without the animal seeing you. Some of the hunters both saw the photograph and the animal body as a trophy. What makes me question the usage of the word shooting today in relation to animals is that trophy/hunting relation.

The other day we went on a hike at the Fontenelle Forest in Omaha, Nebraska. My friend who works there was our tour guide. Before going to the hike we stopped at my friend's office who happen to be getting ready for the Ice Age exhibition that opens this July. In the office she had a stool made out of an elephant foot. It belonged to a tourist that bought it while in an African vacation, but it was confiscated at the US airport by customs. The Fontenelle Nature Association borrowed it from the Omaha zoo to educate people on conservation during the Ice Age exhibit.

The skin on the elephant's foot was rough with some hairs left on it. The top was cushioned with something. It was difficult to imagine a once live elephant while looking at this stool. It was a lot easier to look at it as a trophy or souvenir from this person's trip. However, it did sadden me to think an elephant died because someone wanted to own a piece of it. I hope people who encounter this elephant foot during the Ice Age exhibition will also feel empathy for this once live elephant.


Copyright © 2011 Diana M. Sanchez. All Rights Reserved.