The Psychology of Wildlife Photography
The canyon was worlds apart from the snow-covered Jackson Hole I had been based out of for the last week. While I was stilled locked in four-wheel drive to help push through snow drifts and long stretches of ice on rock, this was more desert than the national park to the west. Giant sagebrush grew interspersed with giant boulders laid down by the hanging glacier at the head of the canyon. These rocks are known as glacial erratics, and many of them are covered in petroglyphs.
The canyon has a very long history of humans making their way into this place. The petroglyphs that line the canyon walls here are what archeologists call Dinwoody tradition. Dating back some 10,000 years, this unique style of rock art can only be found in this region.
I call it rock art, but to the people who created these petroglyphs, the purpose was likely more spiritual than aesthetic. Petroglyphs are powerful cultural symbols that are bound to the cosmology and spiritual beliefs of the people who created them. Often their meaning and intent are inextricable from a place. This is not random graffiti. Entering this canyon is akin to walking into a church built upon Calvary or inside of the Garden of Eden.
Near the head of the canyon a herd of bighorn sheep spread out across the narrow valley floor. Large rams interspersed with ewes and lambs grazed on peaceably. But this is January and the lingering hormones of last month’s rut still coursed through several of the big rams, who from time to time would smack heads with each other or try to get friendly with one of the ladies.
After two back-to-back blizzards, several feet of snow, and temperatures that plunged to minus 50 below, wildlife opportunities had been lacking. But here, at last, was a cornucopia of photographic opportunities in the form of bighorn rams. The only problem was that these rams were on the valley floor.
Psychology is inextricable from art. How we collectively see and think and perceive the world plays a dominant role in how we perceive art. And when I think of bighorn sheep, I do not think of valleys and sagebrush and grassy meadows.
To me, bighorns are the embodiment of rugged mountain wildness. These are a creature purpose built for like on the edge. They spend their summers above treeline, where 3 feet of snow can fall overnight even in August. Their hooves are soft and tacky, the inspiration for specialty shoes worn by rock climbers, and designed to find purchase on the knife edge of rocks and cliffs and precipices that make us dizzy even from the mere thought of such heights and dangers. This is a species of the mountains. Of cliff faces. Of jagged rocks. Of lofty heights from which they survey the world below.
Standing here now, a shiny new Nikon 400 2.8 S lens in hand, there is a disconnect. The sheep suddenly seem a bit too, well, sheep like. Herded together and a knot of fur and horns, this group of bighorns might as well be a small herd of cows, or mule deer, or domesticated sheep on Old McDonald’s farm – if that farm included sagebrush and petroglyphs.
This is not the bighorn sheep of my imagination.
And this is important to recognize. If there is a disconnect for me, then there is likely a disconnect for others as well – especially those who buy photographs of bighorn sheep.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with what these bighorns are doing. There is nothing abnormal here. This is not the result of climate change, human encroachment, the Yellowstone super-volcano getting ready to blow, or the latest Q-Anon conspiracy. Sheep eat grass. Sometimes that grass is at 11,000 feet at the top of a mountain some glacier carved the top off 30,000 years ago. Sometimes that grass is in the bottom of a canyon where the winter sun and winds create critical wintering habitat in a world otherwise temporarily cast back into the Pleistocene and locked beneath feet of snow elsewhere.
From a strictly documentarian perspective, there is nothing wrong or abnormal about photographing sheep wandering about clumps of giant sagebrush. This is part of their biography. This is how they survive the winter.
But from an artistic perspective, it’s all wrong for me.
Over the years, I have written much about what I like to call “capturing the essence” of our subjects. By this I mean our subject’s unique story in a world full of stories. And, well, feeding on grass in the bottom of a canyon is part of their story.
The problem for me, however, is that it doesn’t jive with mental image I have in my mind’s eye.
When I think of trying to tell a subject’s story from the perspective of art, I try to create a running list of adjectives in my head based upon the popular understanding of that animal. And for bighorn sheep, “cow like” is not a picture I conjure up in my head when I think of this species.
Thus, I wait.
I bide my time.
I stay patient, until those opportunities begin to unfold.
Me, I want bighorn rams on rocks and cliffs and snow and ice. I want to exemplify the hardiness and death-defying nature of this species who would give Spiderman a run for his money.
But this doesn’t mean I have to find sheep clinging to the sides of mountains high above me. Instead, I need only find compositional elements that suggest some facet of this in the photograph. A small hillock with a few large boulders will do. A snow-covered hump that I can position myself below so as to “shoot up” at the bighorn ram, suggesting a lofty perch. A sheep near a solid wall of rock complete with abstract like striations that give a hat tip toward what it might look like on the side of a cliff. All of this is good stuff. All of this will do the job nicely of playing into the popular understanding of the species.
Of course, if I was on assignment for a magazine with direction to cover the life history of bighorn sheep, I would absolutely want to show these sheep at work on their wintering grounds. But even then, I know editors are subject to pre-conceived notions and the same mental imagery as the rest of us when it comes to animals. And thus, I would still strive to bring some compositional elements into play that suggest the sheep are high up in the mountains.
These considerations transcend place and species. It doesn’t matter if I am photographing bighorn sheep, moose, or crocodiles. I am always looking for ways to appeal to our collective psyches with my composition.
Moose in Wyoming spend a great deal of time in the winter feeding on bitterbrush. Bitterbrush grows amongst sagebrush and is a favorite food source after the rut and until it becomes buried beneath snow. Understanding this simple fact gives a wildlife photographer the ability to all but guarantee success at finding and photographing moose in Jackson Hole, for instance. But moose standing around in sagebrush just doesn’t jive with how we collectively think of moose. I don’t know about you, but to me moose are the icons of the Northwoods. I think of paper birch, ponds, endless boreal forest, and muskegs. Sagebrush you say? That’s the home of mule deer, wild horses, pronghorn, and sage grouse.
Yet, here are the moose – standing proudly out on the sagebrush flats of the valley fattening up on bitterbrush until it’s no longer accessible and they must retreat back to the willows or sub-alpine firs. This is how they survive. It’s part of their story. But it’s not exactly the part of their story I am looking to tell with my photographs.
Looked at from another perspective, I have never sold a photograph of a bighorn ram grazing on grass or a moose standing in the sagebrush.
As someone who makes their living as a wildlife photographer, this very basic fact of business lends credibility (at least in my mind) to my aversion to photographing these species in ways that run contrary to how we collectively perceive those animals.
None of this is to say there are right and wrong ways to photograph a subject. This is art, after all. If we accepted everyone else’s opinions as to what is right and wrong with art, we never would have had the likes of Monet, Picasso, or Pollock. Art is subjective. As artists we should always be pushing the boundaries. But it is also helpful to understand that with wildlife photography, we always seem to have at least one foot planted in what others perceive to be the real world.
