Life inside the home of novelist and naturalist Gene Stratton-Porter was anything but normal. Birds, butterflies and various other critters had free run of the entire 14-room cabin in Geneva, Indiana. Pupating caterpillars hung from the drapes. Small birds fluttered from an opening near the conservatory window. She once coerced a screech owl into the house to study before releasing it back into the wild the next day. Small slats in the low stone wall that surrounded the house were intentionally left open to allow chipmunks and squirrels to roam freely on the property.
But the single, winged animal that ruled the roost in the home was Major, a brightly colored parrot. Major had a cage hanging in the conservatory of the house, but he rarely ever resided there. The haughty macaw would often sit on the shoulder of Gene or of her daughter Jeannette during dinner, and when tempted, would often swoop down with its curved beak and snap up bits of crackers and crumbs.
One day in 1895, Major popped down from his perch and swiped an oyster right from Gene’s plate and gobbled it heartily. Gene howled with delight and exclaimed to Jeannette and her husband Charles, “How I wish I had a camera!” So, that year at Christmas, Jeannette and Charles presented Gene with the gift of a new miniature box camera.
Since the time when Gene was born in 1863, early photography equipment had been large and cumbersome – bulky wooden boxes with bellows, a long, black cloth draped over the operator, and images captured on large, glass-plate negatives. Highly trained photographers wielded weighty tripods and a metal tray loaded with a powdery mixture of potassium chlorate and magnesium. When ignited, the combustible concoction erupted with small explosions of light and smoke. The bright flashes in the room highlighted stiffly posed subjects in the foreground. In those early days of photography, those subjects were often the most important people of the era: presidents, world leaders, wealthy families and soldiers heading off to battle.
But the camera that Charles and Jeannette Porter presented to Gene that special Christmas in 1895 was something wholly new and exciting. In Rochester, New York in 1888, the Eastman Kodak Company had just created a smaller box camera, which was roughly eight inches square. The camera still had small bellows and required several pounds of related gear and gizmos to operate it properly in the field. But new camera models like these from Kodak, Bausch and Lomb and other companies were smaller and more affordable than their predecessors. For the first time, photography was filtering into the domain of the middle class, as more and more families purchased wooden box cameras and began to document their lives and surroundings.
What began as an enjoyable hobby for the novelist soon turned into a creative obsession, which then blossomed into a second, parallel career as a nature photographer. Gene had spent her entire early writing career attempting to put into words the wonder and beauty of the wildness around her. Now, suddenly, Gene Stratton-Porter was able to capture numerous snapshots of the magic she watched unfold each day at her beloved Limberlost marsh.
Feathery butterflies hovering over a field of wildflowers.
Bird families fussing and preening as they built their nests.
Timid deer sneaking into the meadows to nibble on the native grasses at dusk.
Gene would no longer be limited only to the written word. She now could creatively and lovingly capture these very scenes before her, one powerful frame at a time.
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In the new WTIU/PBS documentary Gene Stratton-Porter: Music of the Wild, we take a deep dive into Gene’s career as a nature photographer, featuring hundreds of images from the collections of state and national archives. Within these collections are dozens of photos of Gene and her family and friends. Just as significantly, however, are hundreds of rare images Gene took herself of the wilderness she loved so dearly.
In the documentary we speak with archivists and naturalists about Gene’s photographic eye. We also speak with nature photographers like Tammy Marlar, a successful wildlife photographer from London who has travelled extensively around the world photographing all types of exotic and domestic gardens, wildlife and natural habitats. We also join Tammy in the field at one of London’s Royal Parks, large and rich in biodiversity. Tammy also provides some insights on Gene’s skills as a nature photographer and the natural habitats she was capturing with her camera.
We also include many of Gene’s first-person accounts of slogging through the sticky swamps of northern Indiana. Each day, cloaked in mosquito netting, jodhpurs and army boots, Gene slung nearly 40 pounds of camera gear through the marshlands during the muggy summer months. Daughter Jeannette told stories of her mother attempting to shinny up tall trees and telegraph poles to perch herself several feet into the air, all in hopes of snagging just the right photograph of a specific bird in the nest. Or when she would develop her glass plate negatives in a chemical bath in the tub of her bathroom, which served as a makeshift dark room.
It takes support from many individual donors, as well as corporations and foundations, to help our WTIU production team travel the country and world to share these important stories of Indiana’s history with PBS stations all over the U.S. Gene Stratton-Porter: Music of the Wild celebrates the very best historical documentaries and wildlife specials that highlight our state and our nation. Thank you for your continued support of our WTIU/PBS productions and for helping us share these critically important and inspiring stories with viewers all over the country.
