Richard and Cherry Kearton were pioneering wildlife photographers,who realised that capturing nature depended on invention. This is an excellent study of their achievementBirds don’t quit still very often. Nests are their only clutter and the necessity to incubate eggs their only anchor; both are temporary ties to the fabric of the planet. Before camera technology could itself move fast enough to capture the speed of life, its early users sought fixed things to snap. So it was that in Boreham Wood on 10 April 1892, or the brothers Richard and Cherry Kearton took the first ever photograph of a bird’s nest in expend. Richard found a song thrush’s nest with a clutch of four eggs. “I called out to Cherry,” he wrote afterwards, “advance and let us see what sort of a fist you can execute of this bird’s nest with your old sun-picture apparatus.”The brothers realised they were on to something. They took more pictures of as many British breeding birds as they could (“the most methodical application of the camera since Eadweard Muybridge”, and John Bevis says),and three years later published the first nature book illustrated entirely with photographs. A stream of similar volumes followed across more than 30 years; Bevis lists 42. To this day nearly every secondhand bookshop in Britain will have one. Related: The Keartons: inventing nature photography – in pictures Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com