Aperture editor Melissa Harris’ A Wild Life: A Visual History of Photographer Michael Nichols initially reminded The Unseen Eye of those “Great Man (or Great Woman”) biographies he read when he was young, books full of passion and single-mindedness. The Eye loved them because they were exciting and inspiring. Ms. Harris manages to guide us in our armchair traveling, exploring Nichols’ many journeys into his many hearts of darkness.
Nichols, known as “Nick”, is a legendary figure in photography, a hero to many and bound to be remembered for his major photo stories over the past 40 years.
He is a story teller, and Harris insists that he is a journalist, in the tradition of “The Concerned Photographer”, using pictures to educate and change the world as well as to amaze us with his work on animals: lions, tigers, elephants, gorillas, apes and on the landscape: caves, forests, jungles and rivers.
“A Wild Life” is a rich adventure, dense with research that never leaves us behind in the underbrush. Ms. Harris artfully machetes her way through a lot of material, Nichols’ many long projects, as well as her thoughtful portraits of people in his life: his wife and sons, his writer colleagues like David Quamman and Tim Cahill, the singular Michael J. Fay who walked across Africa for his The Last Place on Earth (with photos by Nichols), work associates like Nathan Williamson and editors like Kathy Moran and Chris Johns, all vital partners in a unique and marvelous career length collaboration.
Nichols is a seeker of the sublime, with seemingly boundless curiosity, patience, endurance and commitment to his story telling. The journey from his childhood home of Muscle Shoals, Alabama to the Serenghetti, Rwanda, India, Yellowstone and on, has been, to reference myself above, “passionate and single minded”.
Nichols is a rock and roller, a Dead Head, a Stones fan, a charismatic searcher, part “Nick Danger”, part Indiana Jones, part evangelist, and part family man with photographic work realized with talent and tenacity, and stories distinguished by what Harris describes as “narrative strength and evocative character portrayal”.
As a collaborator, he says simply “the words saved me”.
Ms. Harris celebrates that Nichols “finds boundless wonder in all that is wild; he needs that wonder to be yours too”.
His zeal is also fueled by his facility with creating or finding new technologies to conquer the impossible, making a great photograph in the most challenging conditions, whether scrambling down a darkened cave, monitoring cats at night or climbing giant trees.
Harris is a legend herself, working in a savannah of editorial capacities at Aperture for more than 25 years. Her writing here is sharp and clear. Whenever she goes a bit deep into the jungle of information she has researched, she stops and seems to knock on the windshield of our psychic land rover, and then grins at us reaffirming that the story she is telling is indeed amazing.
Her editing and sequencing of Nichols’s photographs is particularly outstanding to the Eye. Her lively descriptions of the work always precede the appearance of an image being talked about so the photographs initially shimmer in our imagination before dazzling us directly.
Formidable, yes, but no “Sheena of the Jungle”, Harris is nonetheless full of pluck and commitment with this project. She caught the fever.
She writes about a night with lions in her campsite, outside her tent. “A strange calm took over. As quietly as I could, I opened my nearby copy of Quamman’s book, Natural Acts, and on the inside front cover scribbled some last words. Just in case. I wanted to let the park authorities know that they should not kill the lions that had killed me – after all, I was the intruder in their home. I certainly didn’t want anyone to sue anyone: it was my choice to be there. And I didn’t want Nick to feel guilty; in my note, I told him I’d never been happier. This is true.”
“Wild thing, you make my heart sing …”. (The Troggs, 1966)
Nichols is best known for his longstanding partnership with The National Geographic Society, but Aperture has also published earlier books with Nichols, Brutal Kinship (1999) and Earth to Sky: Among Africa’s Elephants: A Species in Crisis (2013).
It is “A Wild Life” fully lived.
A wild idea.
W.M. Hunt
Photo collector W.M. Hunt writes as The Unseen Eye. He is an occasional contributor and an original supporter of The Eye of Photography.
Wild: Michael Nichols
June 27 – September 17, 2017
The Philadelphia Museum of Art
600 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy
Philadelphia, PA 19130
USA
