Introduction - Text 1
The Akeley camera appeared in 1916, a product of the project of the eponymous explorer and taxidermist Carl Ethan Akeley. It had been conceived several years prior, when Akeley’s expeditions in search of African fauna were becoming more and more frequent even as this fauna remained as difficult to capture in moving images. The camera would finally enable its inventor to immortalize and reveal horizons still far removed from New York in the early twentieth century. And yet the life of documentary zoological recording for which the Akeley camera was initially conceived would become widely supplemented by a number of other cinematic paths.[1] In 1923 Carl Akeley himself would write in his diary In Brightest Africa: “While I had little idea at first that this camera would fill any other needs than my own, as it has been perfected it has proved its practicability for general use.”[2] The ease and speed with which the Akeley camera could be put into service, bolted to its tripod or stabilized on a nearby rock, along with the possibilities it offered for horizontal and vertical pans and tilts, filled a widely-felt gap in the work of shooting moving images. In fact the material qualities of the camera arose in part from this need. As a relatively small metal cylinder, weighing just a few kilograms, it was portable when working under difficult conditions and facilitated the use of pans and tilts.[3]
