‘Hunting with the camera’

Visitors to the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery in Exeter, England, are often particularly impressed by the life-size stuffed giraffe which takes a prominent place in the centre of the displays of ‘natural history’. What kinds of historical processes and spatial practices were involved in the transformation of this animal from eastern Africa to England and from living, wild animal into a lifeless, domesticated, museum display of ‘nature’? ¹ As it turns out, this giraffe is one of a number of large animals which were donated to the Museum in 1919 by the big-game hunter Charles Victor Alexander Peel (c. 1869–1931). A wealthy Englishman, Peel pursued his ‘sport’—from elephants to polar bears—as far afield as Somaliland and the Outer Hebrides, recounting his exploits in a series of books whose photographs show the author posed with various hunting trophies (Peel 1900, 1901). Most of Peel’s big-game trophies, including the prize giraffe, were shot in Africa between 1890 and 1910, and many found their way into public exhibitions of ‘natural history’. ² The giraffe—shot, preserved, stuffed and given the pet name ‘Gerald’—acquired a prominent position within such displays of ‘wildlife’. These displays not only fabricated and domesticated the animals of distant colonial territories within new public and private spaces ‘back home’, but served as monuments to the big-game hunters who seemed to their contemporaries to wield such mastery over the natural world.