Triggered!: Jonathan Levitt
© Jonathan Levitt
I was in Newfoundland photographing Humpback whales around Witless Bay, and Northern gannets in their nesting colonies near Cape St. Mary’s for my book Echo Mask. The polar bear in the picture is an old mount in a hall of specimens and dioramas at The Rooms - the provincial archives, art gallery, and museum in St Johns. Ursus maritmus: the white bear, the sea bear, the ice bear. There it is day and night, out on the arctic ice - hunting seals (ringed and bearded), ambushing the chirping belugas from below in the manner of the killer whale, gorging on the eggs and chicks of the thick-billed murre. Building maternity dens in winter. In late summer wandering inland for berries. Diving down to the ocean floor for mussels and kelp. Swimming hundreds of miles, for days and days, and underwater for minutes at time. And in the spring floating south on ice floes to the island of Newfoundland. Feasting on newborn seals all the way. Coming ashore in Quirpon, Tilt Cove, Joe Batt’s Arm. Wandering, terrorizing, eating people and dogs. And then when it’s had enough turning around and swimming back to Labrador.
The lights in the museum were low and I had slow color film in the camera. I took a snapshot of the stuffed bear. It was a long exposure and I probably panned slightly to the right as I took the picture, as if following the path of the bear as it moved through the imaginary night. A few weeks later, back home in Maine, I looked at the negative and was surprised to see the stuffed and still bear from the museum convincingly brought to life by some accident of slow shutter and sharp teeth. I did not set out to mix casual photographs of entombed objects with the hard won images of wild animals in nature but somehow the museum bear in the context of real life soaring birds and diving whales seemed just right. Not a real bear, but the mythical bear of nightmares and dreamscapes. Hypercarnivorous and hissing. Nanuq, umka, Pisugtooq (the great wanderer).
