Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America by Jon Mooallem Page A
Authors: Jon Mooallem
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the viewing area where the buggies go, and could be photographed more intimately, at eye level, or even looking up into their harrowing faces. And the property looked pristine and varied. Ladoon is an artist himself—he used to devote a lot of time to painting. From his truck, he started pointing out to me the different backdrops that he offers to photographers: the shoreline, the frozen ponds, the bear trails that wind through the willows. He was the curator of all these real-life landscape paintings for the polar bears to wander in and out of. “There’s so many theaters,” he said, “so many dynamics that can happen in each theater.” What had looked to me a minute ago like bleak and formless nature now resembled a Hollywood back lot. Here photographers could capture polar bears exactly as the public expected to see them.
The more professional photographers I met in Churchill, the more I realized that a good wildlife photograph or film, or at least a marketable one, does just this: shows us an image of nature that’s already lodged in our heads. * However, our imaginative sense of an animal is so powerful that it can also change what we see in pictures.
The German photographer Norbert Rosing first met Brian Ladoon in 1988. He would spend virtually every bear season in Churchill for the next twenty years, often photographing the bears at Ladoon’s dog yard. (Rosing told me that he’s never seen Ladoon feed the bears intentionally but that the polar bears clearly swipe their share of the dogs’ food.) Late one afternoon in 1991, Rosing watched a bear slink hesitantly toward one of Ladoon’s dogs. Its posture went soft. It lofted its right paw in the air, toward the top of the dog’s head, like an old man patting a child. Gradually, the dog got comfortable and approached the bear. Soon the two animals were hugging—actually hugging—with the dog straining on its chain to nuzzle its neck against the bear’s, and the bear enclosing the dog with its fluffy forearm. Ladoon had told Rosing about this bear, which periodically turned up to “play” with the dogs. But Rosing hadn’t believed him. The animals carried on until, finally, the bear was sprawled on its back in the snow, peering up, gazing into the dog’s eyes.
In 1994, Rosing sold a series of photographs to
National Geographic
, documenting this entire play session. Immediately, he was besieged by angry faxes and phone calls. The public image of the polar bear was still what it had been a decade earlier, when National Geographic broadcast
Polar Bear Alert
:
a fierce killer that terrified mothers in the middle of the night and assaulted cameramen in cages. People assumed the dog had been chained up as bait for the white monster—clearly, the bear wasn’t playing, but springing a sinister trap; it must have gored the dog right after Rosing’s last shot. No one wanted to see the photos, Rosing told me. “People just couldn’t believe it.” After a while, he put the pictures away.
Thirteen years later, the pictures found their way onto the Web site of a public radio show in Minnesota. It was the summer of 2007 now—polar bear fever, brought on by the endangered species list petition, was peaking. The bear had been transformed in people’s minds. It was adorable now, defenseless—less like a marauder and more like a teddy bear, an animal that
would
be inclined to play. “Now people feel they can touch and pet bears,” Rosing told me, “because they’re just so nice, so cute, so curious.” And because the polar bear looked different, the pictures looked different, too. The same photos that had reviled people in 1994 now touched them. They rapidly racked up three million views on the radio show’s Web site, then spurted around the Internet, where they’ve cheerfully blossomed in all kinds of contexts since.
Recently, a friend forwarded me a chain e-mail he’d received from a woman he described as “literally a friend of a friend of a
The more professional photographers I met in Churchill, the more I realized that a good wildlife photograph or film, or at least a marketable one, does just this: shows us an image of nature that’s already lodged in our heads. * However, our imaginative sense of an animal is so powerful that it can also change what we see in pictures.
The German photographer Norbert Rosing first met Brian Ladoon in 1988. He would spend virtually every bear season in Churchill for the next twenty years, often photographing the bears at Ladoon’s dog yard. (Rosing told me that he’s never seen Ladoon feed the bears intentionally but that the polar bears clearly swipe their share of the dogs’ food.) Late one afternoon in 1991, Rosing watched a bear slink hesitantly toward one of Ladoon’s dogs. Its posture went soft. It lofted its right paw in the air, toward the top of the dog’s head, like an old man patting a child. Gradually, the dog got comfortable and approached the bear. Soon the two animals were hugging—actually hugging—with the dog straining on its chain to nuzzle its neck against the bear’s, and the bear enclosing the dog with its fluffy forearm. Ladoon had told Rosing about this bear, which periodically turned up to “play” with the dogs. But Rosing hadn’t believed him. The animals carried on until, finally, the bear was sprawled on its back in the snow, peering up, gazing into the dog’s eyes.
In 1994, Rosing sold a series of photographs to
National Geographic
, documenting this entire play session. Immediately, he was besieged by angry faxes and phone calls. The public image of the polar bear was still what it had been a decade earlier, when National Geographic broadcast
Polar Bear Alert
:
a fierce killer that terrified mothers in the middle of the night and assaulted cameramen in cages. People assumed the dog had been chained up as bait for the white monster—clearly, the bear wasn’t playing, but springing a sinister trap; it must have gored the dog right after Rosing’s last shot. No one wanted to see the photos, Rosing told me. “People just couldn’t believe it.” After a while, he put the pictures away.
Thirteen years later, the pictures found their way onto the Web site of a public radio show in Minnesota. It was the summer of 2007 now—polar bear fever, brought on by the endangered species list petition, was peaking. The bear had been transformed in people’s minds. It was adorable now, defenseless—less like a marauder and more like a teddy bear, an animal that
would
be inclined to play. “Now people feel they can touch and pet bears,” Rosing told me, “because they’re just so nice, so cute, so curious.” And because the polar bear looked different, the pictures looked different, too. The same photos that had reviled people in 1994 now touched them. They rapidly racked up three million views on the radio show’s Web site, then spurted around the Internet, where they’ve cheerfully blossomed in all kinds of contexts since.
Recently, a friend forwarded me a chain e-mail he’d received from a woman he described as “literally a friend of a friend of a
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