Photographer’s Unusual Vision Sheds New Light on the Survivors of Endangered Species

The pictures were simply strange, like nothing else the readers of National Geographic had witnessed in its pages before. Certainly the subject matter was familiar enough: survivors of endangered species culled from the forests, mountains and deserts of Africa, Asia and North America. The unsettling thing was the dramatic change of habitat.

Here photographer James Balog was presenting these otherwise healthy looking animals against a seamless white backdrop, lit with all the crisp detail of commercial photography and lighting. A portrait of a chimpanzee offered a cropped rear view, the animal’s hands clasped behind its back oddly like a human’s in repose. In another frame, an Asian elephant lumbered gracefully toward the viewer and through a gauzy white curtain, much of its arched form still in ghostly silhouette.

The collection of these sometimes traditional, sometimes wildly conceptual portraits challenged readers of the magazine’s April, 1990, issue to break from what Balog called a romantic fantasy of animals living isolated and safe from civilization. Now in its first Los Angeles showing, through Feb. 23 at the Fahey/Klein Gallery, “Survivors” and its rich color and texture of fur, feather and horn, looks at these endangered creatures and their uncertain place in the modern world.

“I see this stuff as being a metaphor for us,” Balog said recently, surrounded in the gallery by the exhibit’s 16 large prints. “I don’t see this as just being about animals, about something outside of Homo sapiens. What’s happening in a lot of these pictures is that there’s some sort of response between our collective unconscious and these animals. I think you’re sort of recognizing yourself.”

This intimate vision came to Balog in late 1986, he said, while on assignment for a special National Geographic publication on endangered wildlife. He was photographing a herd of rhinos at the San Diego Wild Animal Park from the back of a pickup truck when one of the animals walked up and calmly rested its chin on the tailgate. And for about 15 minutes Balog and the rhino stared at each other, the animal’s horned head bathed in golden, late afternoon sunlight, just inches away from the camera.

“I suddenly found that all the normal distractions in the visual field were stripped away,” Balog said of his subsequent moment of revelation. “I just saw him, simply and more directly. I realized that in an alternate environment, you would see the animals differently.”

Soon, he decided to photograph 96 endangered species in a blunt and creative style that was also an aggressive departure from traditional, outdoor wildlife photography. He would travel through the United States and Asia, shooting 233 largely tamed zoo and circus animals against a white backdrop and other unnatural settings.

Balog approached National Geographic with the project, looking for financial support to defray his $150,000 in expenses. He was turned down three times, told it was outside the scope of the magazine’s long-established visual style. Life magazine also declined. But he continued anyway, traveling a total of almost 80,000 miles with a portable studio, piecing together financial support from a variety of grants and confirmed assignments from European magazines.

A 1990 book collecting the work, “Survivors: A New Vision of Endangered Wildlife” (Abrams), and National Geographic’s decision to finally publish the series have only recently helped Balog to financially break even.

There were other problems along the way.

“The challenge was to find an individual of that endangered species that you could work with,” explained Balog, 38. “There are a lot of mandrills in zoos spread across North America. But there is no mandrill except one that you could possibly get in front of a white background and not have him tear it apart.”

The exhibition’s portrait of that green-haired baboon has the animal looking pleasant and approachable, sitting cross-legged on a bar stool. It appears relaxed, hands folded, in spite of the bright red and white surface of its harsh, ridged face.

Other photographs required more elaborate preparations designed to coerce an animal to stay within camera range. One ocelot Balog photographed had to be baited with food, leading the small, energetic Latin American cat momentarily between two white Formica pillars.

“I realized early on that I had to work with what the animals were giving me, what the circumstances were giving me, and turn that into a picture, rather than try to control everything all the time,” he said. “I had to go with the flow.

Balog’s favorite experience on the “Survivors” project, he said, was with the gorilla Koko, the famed subject of a 17-year study of the animal’s ability to communicate with sign language. The photographer traveled from his Boulder, Colo., residence to Koko’s house trailer at the Gorilla Foundation near Stanford.

Koko’s first question, posed in sign language, was simple, Balog remembered. “Do you have any candy?”

He didn’t, but the gorilla was apparently just as interested in hugging the tall photographer and looking under his shirt to play with Balog’s chest.

“It was real, real intense. It was also scary. They said to me, ‘Well, we’re leaving now, and we’ll be looking at you through the window. But if anything goes wrong, we can’t do anything for you.’ So in some part of your psyche you’re scared to death, and your heart’s going pitter-pat. But you really have to calm down and try to be relatively at ease.”

In other situations, the animals would quiet down too much, bored with the surrounding scene of Balog, his assistant, animal handlers, lights and large format cameras. Very often, Balog had to get his shot within the first 25 minutes. Some of his subjects lost interest after just five minutes.

Some readers of National Geographic and others found something disturbing about “Survivors” when first confronted with the alternately stark and fanciful images.

“I think the pictures carry a lot of different messages,” offered gallery owner David Fahey. “The implied statement is that they are living beings and we should treat them as such, with that kind of respect. What it forces you to do is to really concentrate on the animal, and how beautiful that animal is.”

National Geographic also received a few letters from subscribers concerned about the treatment of the animals during the project. One Balog photograph published in the magazine had an Atlantic Green Turtle resting in a white pillow on its back, appearing helpless and vulnerable as its delicate pale underside faces the camera.

The 15-month-old turtle was photographed in the back yard of a woman known by some as the “Turtle Lady,” 85-year-old environmentalist Ila Loetscher. She assured Balog at the time, he said, that the turtle would be unbothered lying on the pillow for up to several hours.

“I had to trust her knowledge and sensitivity for the turtles,” he said. “In spite of the fact that it does look uncomfortable, it seemed to be very comfortable, as comfortable as a sea turtle out of the ocean can be.”

Although Balog has devoted much film to documenting the natural world, he insisted he is not classifiable as simply a “wildlife photographer.”

His “Wildlife Requiem,” a 1984 book Fahey described as both “beautiful and repulsive at the same time,” dealt with the plight of game animals. In that series of photographs, North American hunters were depicted in near-surreal fashion alongside their killed deer, strapped to the hoods of cars. But Balog has also experimented in other directions and media, including 10-foot-tall sculptural works that incorporated photography with metal, foam and paint.

Simple wildlife photography, he said, left him unfulfilled as an artist.

“As much as I love being outdoors like that, the process of visual creativity in those settings is not appealing to me because it’s relatively passive. You can’t articulate your own personal vision in those kinds of pictures. You’re trying to find a happy conjunction between lighting and good animal behavior.”

He also has participated in the successful series of “Day in the Life” books on America, Russia, Spain and elsewhere. As part of the scattered team for those books, Balog has photographed Eskimos whale hunting on the ice of Northern Alaska and traveled to an isolated corner of South Siberia that he said hadn’t been documented by a Western photographer since before the Russian Revolution in 1917.

As for the “Survivors” portrait series, Balog considers it done, although he may utilize the same technique to study in closer detail a single chimpanzee or other primate. In spite of the favorable attention the work has earned from a variety of national magazines and metropolitan newspapers, the photographer said he’s not anxious to return to the zoo environment.

“I never had much in common with it on a personal level,” he said, before joking, “and I’d like to work with beautiful women in Paris instead.”

“Survivors” continues through Feb. 23 at the Fahey/Klein Gallery, 148 N. La Brea Ave. Open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. No admission charge. For information, call (213) 934-2250.