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8 | (continued) It happened that she was at the time unemployed, and had a smart little red hatchback, perfect for transporting not only myself, but the tripod and camera case as well, both of which were uncommonly heavy. She accepted the job on the spot; all she had to do was pick me up at 8:00 a.m. at her father’s house, drive me to the zoo, then pick me up there at 5:00, and drive me back. For this, she would be paid a goodly sum per hour. The client had opened an account at a large camera store, and had put 50 rolls of his film of choice, Fuji Velvia, on order, for his photographers to draw from. When the clerk told me this, knowing what the job entailed, I saw my chance and took it. I had always wanted to shoot a zoo, and here I was being paid $700 a day to do just that. I grabbed 30 rolls, added them to the half-dozen I had, and set out to immortalize some very rare beasts. In four days, I shot the lot: 36 rolls, about 1,300 images. Every species that came out in the sun got its picture taken. In some instances I should have been using a lens longer than my 300mm, which is not quite powerful enough for all of the “tight shots” the client asked for (it’s a big zoo—one of the world’s largest), but the 300mm was the longest one I’ve ever been able to afford. Of course the client, a young bureaucrat in the Ministry of Tourism, was annoyed that I had shot so much, and even though I’d known him for years, I found his reaction mystifying. Then the truth dawned: he had no clerical help at the time, and would have to sort all of these slides by himself—which he hated doing. I made peace with him by offering to come in and do the initial sort myself free of charge: removing the ones he couldn’t use because they were a little over-exposed, underexposed, tilted, fuzzy (slightly out of focus), etc.—these always occur, regardless how careful the photographer is; we just don’t normally let anyone see them. Photographing animals, even in a zoo, is not the piece of cake I thought it would be. In the first place, my on-site transportation—being driven by a nice young woman in a golf cart around the grounds—lasted only a day, the apparent limit of city hospitality for a provincial ministry. They presumably had other people to be nice to, so from the second day, I was on my own. I didn’t complain; I was still getting in free. But the walking cramped my style, so to speak—not my photographic style, just my mobility. Some of the compounds are more than a quarter-mile apart. I got many satisfying shots in those four days, but a large percentage of them would under no circumstances be welcomed by the zoo officials for their own publicity. The simple reason is that their budget was not at the time, nor it is now, nor will it ever be, sufficient to allow them to house every species in a space appropriate to its daily habits. This is of course a thorn in the side of zoo-keepers everywhere; there is in fact scarcely a captive species in the world which is content with the space they have been allotted. Without belaboring the matter, let’s consider some specifics: elephants, pumas, African lions, Bengal tigers, antelopes, anthropoid apes, eagles, mountain goats, bison, gaurs (wild cattle from south Asia), moose, musk oxen, polar bears, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, giraffes and zebras are all given to foraging over large areas, and this is clearly impossible in captivity. They all must accept being fed by the keepers, in a space that is exceedingly restricted, by their standards. Nevertheless, I got some images that I can recall to this day. Shooting the eagles in their laughably small enclosure, in which they could barely spread their great wings, much less actually fly, I focused on their faces through the wire mesh that surrounded them. This put the mesh out of focus, and made it almost invisible. But their faces looked appropriately furious at being kept in such humiliating confinement. |
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