Pictures of animals are now ubiquitous, but the ability to capture animals on
film was a significant challenge in the early era of photography. In Developing
Animals, Matthew Brower takes us back to the time when Americans started taking
pictures of the animal kingdom, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the
moment when photography became a mass medium and wildlife photography an
increasingly popular genre.

Developing Animals compellingly investigates the way photography changed our
perception of animals. Brower analyzes how photographers created new ideas about
animals as they moved from taking pictures of taxidermic specimens in so-called
natural settings to the emergence of practices such as camera hunting, which
made it possible to capture images of creatures in the wild.

By combining approaches in visual cultural studies and the history of photography,
Developing Animals goes further to argue that photography has been essential not
only to the understanding of wildlife but also to the conceptual separation of
humans and animals.

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