The “Wild: Michael Nichols” Exhibit (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.)

The "Wild: Michael Nichols" Exhibit

The “Wild: Michael Nichols” Exhibit, opened last June 27, 2017 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, explores the work of legendary wildlife photographer, artist and technical innovator Michael “Nick” Nichols, an ardent and zealous advocate of natural habitat and species preservation. The show runs until September 17, 2017.

 

3,200 year old Sequoia Tree in a Blizzard

Before we entered the galleries, we gaped at two 60-foot wall hangings, at the Grand Stair Hall, a 3,200 year old sequoia tree in a blizzard and a 1,500 year old redwood tree being climbed by members of Nichols' crew. The latter image is the result of 84 separate images that created a composite that became a five-page fold out in an issue of National Geographic.

 

1,500 Year Old Coastal Redwood, California (2009)

For more than three decades, Nichols, a renowned, award-winning photographer for National Geographic (he became a staff photographer in 1996 and editor at large for photography in 2008), has ventured to the farthest reaches of the world to document nature’s wildest creatures and landscapes recording, with an unparalleled intensity, animals and habitats in some of the most remote areas of the world.  

The Sharks, Bachelor Gelada Baboons, Simian Mountains, Ethiopia (2002)

He bravely ventured into the world’s most remote, forbidding, and dangerous environments in locations as expansive as the Congo Basin, the Serengeti and the American West.

 

Botanist Take a Core Sample of a 350 year old Redwood Tree, Redwood National Park, California (2008)

He said most of his photographs were the result of diligence and luck.  The split-second magic of images captured by Nichols’s stunning photographs, offer intense confrontations with the power and fragility of the wild and a reflection of our own humanity.

 

Bright Angel Point, Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona (2008)

This exhibition presents his most important projects, highlighting his artistic accomplishments, technical innovations, and efforts to preserve wild spaces. His photographs are shown with depictions of nature from the museum’s collection, inviting visitors to consider humankind’s complex, and often brutal, relationship with the wild.

 

Fantastic Pit, Ellison's Cave, Georgia (1986)

The exhibit includes information about how challenging it was to rig up ways to capture images for the 30 expansive articles he compiled for National Geographic.  He sat for hours, and sometimes days, for the nature shot and not a single photo displayed was taken from a Range Rover on a tourist safari as most were from “hides,” usually a lean-to kind of setup where the photographer waited endlessly for targets to show up at a watering hole, beach, savanna or forest.

 

From Point Sublime, Grand Canyon National Park (2005)

According to Nichols, lions are a bit social, aren't afraid of humans and hunt at night so he used infrared sensors for those photos. However, he can't get close to tigers even after sitting for 19 days in a hide, a grass structure. In three months, he only got one photo of a tiger (which he dubbed as “Charger”), via a camera robot, from a camera trap.

 

Jane Goodall with Gregoire, Brazzaville Zoo,
Republic of the Congo (1995)

In days before digital cameras, about half of the photos in the exhibit were taken with film. Some of his works are paired with paintings, sculptures and artifacts already in the museum's collection. For example, in one gallery displaying photos of elephants, there is a carved ivory chair and foot stool. Another photo, of a silver back gorilla, is installed near a poster depicting a well-known Tommy Dale Palmore painting “Reclining Nude” of a seductively posing gorilla lying on a Oriental carpet.

 

Northern Spotted Owl in Young Redwood Forest, California, 2008

Other photos in the exhibit were heart breaking, showing the results of elephant poaching to collect ivory. At the end of the exhibit, before you exit into the exhibit gift shop, is the video room where you could watch the looped video that includes crew members who worked with Nichols.

 

Mountain Gorillas, Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda (1995)

From June 27 to September 4, 2017, Art Splash, the museum’s popular family program presented by PNC Arts Alive, will explore themes from the exhibition via in-gallery explorations, hands-on workshops, guided tours, performances and festivals.

 

Night, Havasu Falls, Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona (2004)

Wild: Michael Nichols: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19130. Tel: 215-763-8100. Website: www.philamuseum.org. Open Tuesdays- Sundays, 10 AM – 5 PM, Wednesday and Friday evenings until 8:45 PM. Admission: US$20 (adult), US$18 (seniors), US$14 (students with ID and youth 13 to 18). Children below 12 years old enter for free. Discounted tickets are available online. Tickets are valid for two consecutive days and include admission to the Rodin Museum.