Hunting with the Camera: Nature Photography, Manliness, and Modern Memory, 1890–1930

On January 7, 1892, Forest and Stream – the magazine of “true sportsmen” – featured a photograph of wild mule deer taken by Fred Baker, a hunter from Wyoming. A doe and her two fawns rest peacefully in front of a patch of sagebrush, as the midday sun casts a bright light. “Here, by a piece of good fortune which might not come to a man once in a lifetime,” the editor George Bird Grinnell explained, “Mr. Baker discovered the deer, and creeping up to the edge of the ravine focussed his camera on them without disturbing their siesta.” Grinnell emphasized to readers the accuracy and details portrayed in the image – the large mule-like ears of the deer and the black tips of fur that marked their tails. But he also drew a moral message from this scene of tranquility. “The flesh of the mule deer is excellent eating,” Grinnell wrote, “far better in the estimation of some people than that of the Virginia deer; but we think a man would have to be pretty hungry or quite without soul who would be willing to disturb the charming family group which is shown in our illustration. As we grow older we incline more and more to the opinion that a camera is sometimes a more satisfactory implement to hunt with than a gun.”