Shooting Animals: Cameras, Guns, and Rethinking Nature, 1880–1920

MSU PhD candidate LaTrelle Scherffius looks at wildlife photography in eastern Montana in the years between 1880 and 1920, when many increasingly saw nature as something to protect, rather than conquer or control. In 1892, George Bird Grinnell called for hunters to put down the gun and take up the camera. The shift toward “camera hunting” is marked by a transition away from photographs celebrating a hunter’s kill and toward photographs that capture animals in “nature.”