Mr. Akeley’s Movie Camera - Text 4
The team finally selected two bronze sculptures: Akeley’s Wounded Comrade, probably his most famous bronze, and Lion and Buffalo, a dynamic treatment of those two animals in battle. The expedition photos were treated as large graphics, to increase visibility, but we decided to display a vintage glass negative to illustrate the technology of the time and also be able to include a real object (Akeley negatives being too fragile to risk putting on display, we bought a glass negative dating to circa 1910 from an auction site, and displayed it as an example). Inspired by photo archivist Nina Cummings, we also included a series of 1896 Akeley photos of a Somali man throwing a spear – multiple exposures that, viewed in order, suggest motion, à la Eadweard Muybridge.
With the objects determined, production supervisor Michael Paha set about locating display cases of appropriate size for each, and cleaning and refurbishing them as needed. Graphic designer Gloria Chantell took charge of the graphic treatments, and 3D designer Kyoji Nakano handled the design of the gallery space and the placement of the objects in the cases, and also came up with the idea of back-lighting the glass negative in the photography case. There was general agreement that an exhibit about a movie camera should include a film, and the Safari Museum in Chanute, Kansas was kind enough to give permission to pull clips from Martin and Osa Johnson’s Simba: King of the Beasts (1928). Part of this film was shot with an Akeley, and included footage shot by Akeley himself. Simon Watson, our video producer, edited together some expedition scenes, and footage of people using an Akeley camera, providing a vivid representation of what the camera was capable of. Simon completed the visitor experience by selecting some Chopin (Nocturnes, I believe) as atmospheric music. Meanwhile, Ryan Schuessler was writing the label copy in the back of a van hurtling through the countryside in Bosnia, where he was researching an exhibit on the ancient Balkans.
In parallel with all this were weekly team meetings to discuss progress and fine-tune the various elements, and several milestone meetings to get sign-off from the Exhibitions Department. The process went smoothly, but even a small gallery show entails more work and more hands than one might imagine – this one took more than four months from start to finish, and involved the contributions of more than 40 people. At some point the title Mr. Akeley’s Movie Camera was arrived at.
In late June the installation began, supervised by Mike Paha, and the show opened on July 20. It was well attended, and garnered a surprising amount of publicity for a “small” show on a rather arcane topic. Critic Steve Johnson wrote in the Chicago Tribune that the exhibition would be easy to overlook, especially running at the same time as two more high-profile temporary exhibitions, Mummies and Antarctic Dinosaurs. “But,” he declared, “this little show in the Brooker Gallery, dedicated to the obsession to reproduce the natural world that animated Field Museum founding father and first chief taxidermist Carl Akeley, drives to the very heart of the museum’s mission.”
