I’ve always been a bit shy about my fairly substantial body of African wildlife photos, for many reasons.
The first is simple: anybody who has spent time in game reserves in southern or eastern Africa ends up with pictures of wildlife. It’s a crowded visual space and it is incredibly easy to feel that you might become a total bore, the equivalent of the dad who puts guests to sleep with an interminable slide show from the last family vacation. It can’t help but feel a bit like a photo brag. And you’re aware that most of the shots you have are barely distinguishable from anybody else’s except for the ones from someone who makes a living doing it.
The images, like many wildlife pictures everywhere, also conceal the reality of the conditions that allowed them to be taken. I’ve got a decent telephoto lens, and nature photography is pretty much the only thing that it’s highly suited for, but most of the time that you’re getting pictures of charismatic megafauna in Africa or anywhere, you’re sitting in a jeep or on a boat or at a scenic overlook with many other people. In my entire life of walking in wildlife reserves and various trails, I’ve seen big mammals up close only rarely in contexts where it was just me and them and I happened to have a camera at the ready. (There was that time when I was working on my dissertation where I went for an unsupervised walk up the Zambezi River and got treed by some hippos, but I didn’t have my camera and I also was being the kind of stupid and entitled that only white men in their twenties can manage with aplomb.) In most African game reserves, if there’s an interesting animal close to the road, there will be a line of viewing trucks waiting to see it. (One of the things I absolutely love about Kruger National Park in South Africa is that you’re free to drive about on your own, which at least breaks up that dynamic slightly.) This lion feeding on a zebra that she and her pack had brought down a short while earlier was being watched by about 30 people as she chowed down.
Now, mind you, I love nothing better than hiking and watching for animals. I am more interested in reptiles, amphibians, insects, small mammals and birds than I am in big charismatic animals, to be honest. When I was a teenager, I thought I might become a biologist, though what I had in mind was rather more like amateur naturalism. And so I’ve also enjoyed photographing animals of all kinds, everywhere I’ve gone with a camera. I have some good shots of animals from almost every trip I’ve taken since I got involved with photography.
However, my third concern with my photos on this theme (African wildlife pictures) is simply because it’s what most people know about sub-Saharan Africa and in my regular professional role as an African historian I spend a lot of time trying to change that perception. Even when I’m teaching about African environmental history, I’m often trying to shift the foundational perspective away from what Americans see when they see African environments on screen or in books. And yet I do love going to reserves when I’m there and when I’m there I like to take pictures, and some of them come out pretty well, if not at the level that people with top-level gear, expertise and access manage to take.
So I’ll put them up here from time to time. How could I not? And yet, there will always be something in me saying: don’t.