James Balog and the Anima of Photography

By Teri Ebel

Anima is a startling, arresting, challenging book of photographic images. Two well-articulated torsos clothed only in flesh and downy hair - one unmistakably human, one undeniably chimpanzee. The crepey white skin of an 83-year-old nude leaning against the creamy shoulder of a quizzical monkey. Isabella Rossellini’s serene face gently cupped in the dusky hands of an ape. Selected as one of Time magazine’s 1993 gift book selections of the year and recipient of the prestigious Graphis Book Design Award, Boulder photographer James Balog’s third book was so radical he couldn’t find a publisher for it. So Anima (Arts Alternative Press, 1993) was self-published - for an admittedly small audience.
“The problem is almost everybody is just recording the world with home photographic toys, not doing metaphor or ideas. We have a photographic culture that’s not conditioned to think in terms of symbol,” the 47-year-old photographer explains. “Secondly, the commercial visual culture is so oriented toward superficial gloss that people get even more conditioned. For the very few of us who are out beyond that, only a minuscule portion of the population is still with us.”
Since his boyhood in woods that would soon become New Jersey suburbs, Balog has tried to see into animals’ souls. “Out beyond the subdivisions, in the remaining woodland, I discovered the secret lives of the animals who still lived there: whitetail deer, pheasant and turkey and grouse, fox and rabbit, even the occasional black bear. I resolved to touch those lives, both then and in an indeterminate future,” he writes in the introduction to his most recent book, Animal (Graphis Press, 1999). “At the time, the only people around me who gave much thought to wild animals were hunters, and with that role model as my guide, I killed so I could caress a pheasant’s kaleidoscopic feathers or touch the magical sleekness of a deer.”
At age 9, Balog captured his first photographic images of woodland creatures with his Brownie box camera. By 1971, when he was about to be drafted for the Vietnam War, he realized he was a conscientious objector not only to killing human beings, but also to hunting animals.
Yet his compulsion to know animals remained, culminating in a lifetime of documenting their lives and shooting their portraits. After graduating with degrees in geology and communications, Balog started making a living through nature photography. Commercial work (where a large part of his “creative energy was frittered away in the interest of subsistence”) led to magazine work, and in 1984 he published his first book, Wildlife Requiem (International Center of Photography), which explored why people hunt. A bear’s hide sprawls on a garage floor. In the background a row of antelope heads await mounting. A woman in jeans kneels to stroke a dachshund as it sniffs the bear’s blood. The unobtrusive caption explains the marshmallow baiting of the bear, how her innards were left as bait for another of her kind, and the important rescue of the pet dog from a well upon the hunter’s triumphal return. This dry recounting of events, and the appalling photo, say it all.
Balog’s next book, Survivors : A New Vision of Endangered Wildlife (Harry N. Abrams, 1990), put his work squarely in the public eye. After years of photographing bucolic natural scenes in national parks and game preserves - Alaskan brown bears catching salmon, bighorn sheep battling, a moose delicately grazing in a Yellowstone pond - Balog was watching a sunset gild a rhinoceros when he was suddenly thunderstruck.
“Why not use the same techniques portraitists use with models to capture the intrinsic beauty of wild animals? So began my stylized portraits,” he wrote in an article for this spring’s Lands’ End catalog. “The irony of using consumer culture devices [studio lighting, artificial backdrops and classic poses] to photograph wild, unbridled things wasn’t lost on me. Consumerism celebrates acquisitiveness and shallow standards of perfection, and nothing could be further from the spiritual awe I feel for nature. But, at the same time, those devices - especially those of advertising photography - define what’s considered valuable in our world.”

New Ways to See
From Survivors’ intense cover portrait of a Florida panther, Balog went on to transform the wildlife photography world. His overtly staged portraits “led me into the secret labyrinth of the animal mind, revealing that intangible yet unmistakable force called consciousness,” he writes in Animal. “I came to understand that animals in captivity give us an opportunity for seeing into the personality and psyche of the other end of the biological spectrum. So I think of my stylized portraits as personality, if not celebrity shots.”
Lacking a publisher, Balog and his agent fueled Survivors with their credit cards, leaving Balog deeply in debt before National Geographic jumped in with eleventh-hour support. The book, which enjoyed four printings, went on to win the Leica Medal of Excellence and paved the way for other successes.
Widely recognized for his work in Time, Vanity Fair and National Geographic, Balog is the only photographer ever commissioned to create a series of stamps for the U.S. Postal Service. The popular 1996 endangered species stamps combine precision photography with the brilliance and beauty of animals, and include 15 animal portraits—from blue-striped garter snakes and a balletic swallowtail to a phlegmatic Wyoming toad.
In addition to Wildlife Requiem, Survivors and Anima, Balog’s titles include a children’s board book, James Balog’s Animals A to Z (Chronicle, 1996), released when his daughter Simone was 8, and the recent Animal, a compendium of Balog’s creative eras that culminates in a final acknowledgment: “...my deep gratitude goes to all the anonymous animals who tolerated me and my bizarre photographic process. I wish there were some way to know how the results look and feel to them.”
Though his photographs are unquestionably powerful, they’re only part of Balog’s message. Through captions and sometimes lengthy introductions, the photographer reveals his talent as a wordsmith. Subsequent reflections on capturing images read like brief ballads. In fact, Balog plans to switch the emphasis from images to words in his next book. “I want it to be at least fifty percent a writing book, and I’ve often thought of making it ninety percent a writing book and just having little signatures scattered through it that pull out into the picture world.”
Ultimately, Balog thrives on art in all its forms. And he believes inspiration always awaits. As he put it in Animal, “...somewhere out in the darkness, beyond our collective beam of light, images flutter around waiting for the right time to reveal themselves; when we are ready for them, an unknown breeze springs up and blows them into sight.”