Animals

Animals were hard to photograph for a long time. A 19th-century exposure could take several seconds, and few animals will hold still that long. So most of the early animal pictures in any archive are prints, and the photographs that do exist tend to be of animals that could not easily leave.

That is part of why the zoo appears so often. The Philadelphia Zoo, opened in 1874, is usually counted as the first in the country, and the National Zoo in Washington followed in 1889. Zoos of that period were built for viewing, with iron bars and bare concrete, and the photographs show visitors in their Sunday clothes leaning on the rails. The animals often look small and a little worn, which is accurate.

Birds belonged to the illustrators. John James Audubon's Birds of America, printed between 1827 and 1838 on enormous sheets, set the standard that later bird artists worked from. The idea was to show each bird life-size and in a natural pose. Audubon worked from birds he had shot and wired into position, which is why some of the poses look more dramatic than any living bird would manage.

Fish and marine life had a similar story. The Victorians went through an aquarium craze in the 1850s, when people learned to keep sea creatures alive in glass tanks at home. Public aquariums followed, including the New York Aquarium, which opened in 1896 in the old Castle Garden fort at the Battery. Government fisheries work produced detailed color plates of fish that were made for identification and are now prized for their color. Shells were collected and drawn with the same care.

Look at the backgrounds in the photographs. A zoo picture usually shows as much about the people and the buildings as about the animal, and those details date the image as surely as any caption.