In Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930), Henry Wentworth Akeley is the man who engages in investigative photography and phonograph recording of the alien Mi-go in “the wild domed hills” of Vermont.
What appears to have been overlooked by Lovecraftian scholars is that there really was an Akeley doing rather similar work, and that he had died only a few years previously. This Akeley had been world famous, a great ‘living hero’ to the boys of America. Thus the readers of Weird Tales would not have failed to make a connection between the real Akeley and Lovecraft’s Akeley.
Akeley with his field camera.
Carl E. Akeley (1864-1926) was a staff explorer of the New York Museum of Natural History, and he went on extended scientific / hunting expeditions to explore the jungles of Africa. Like Lovecraft’s Akeley, frustrated with the inadequacies of traditional methods of recording field-work, Carl E. Akeley famously turned to new technologies to record both animals and ethnographic material. He became well-known among field workers for inventing the ‘Akeley Film Camera’ (1915). This was a one-man tripod camera designed ‘from the ground up’ to be portable when travelling on foot. It came complete with easy-loading film canisters for near-instant set up and filming. Twin-lenses enabled a framed and focussed preview of what was being recorded on film. The researcher could thus instantly tell if the object being filmed was going out of focus, and subtly adjust the main lens accordingly.
Admittedly Lovecraft’s Akeley uses only a mundane Kodak camera able to do ‘time exposures’, of the sort Lovecraft himself owned…
His reply came almost by return mail; and contained, true to promise, a number of kodak views of scenes and objects illustrating what he had to tell. Glancing at these pictures as I took them from the envelope, I felt a curious sense of fright and nearness to forbidden things; for in spite of the vagueness of most of them, they had a damnably suggestive power which was intensified by the fact of their being genuine photographs—actual optical links with what they portrayed, and the product of an impersonal transmitting process without prejudice, fallibility, or mendacity.
Another photograph — evidently a time-exposure taken in deep shadow — was of the mouth of a woodland cave…
Yet Carl E. Akeley also made many audio phonograph recordings, one of which has even slowed down and claimed by a Lovecraftian prop-maker to be ‘the’ phonograph recording of the Mi-go made by Lovecraft’s Akeley.
He doesn’t appear to have been inventive in portable phonograph technology, but his work can be seen in his ‘Akeley Camera’ patent applications from the 1910s and 20s…
He is also credited with having invented modern taxidermy as such, since he was an avid big-game hunter in Africa in the golden age of such things and wished to preserve the trophy heads. Which in a way gives perhaps a slight satirical edge to the ending of “The Whisperer in Darkness”, in which Akeley himself becomes a ‘trophy head’, expertly preserved and set to be shipped to Yoggoth.
Carl E. Akeley’s invention of a useful field camera partly emerged from this big-game hunting, since as an intelligent man he probably realised that the big-game hunting era of the 1920s would not last indefinitely. He is on record in the mid 1920s writing that he wanted to encourage a new generation of ‘camera hunters’ alongside the ‘gun hunters’…
… camera hunters appeal to me as being so much more useful than the gun hunters. They have their pictures to show — still pictures and moving pictures — and when their game is over the animals are still alive to play another day. Moreover, according to any true conception of sport — the use of skill, daring, and endurance in overcoming difficulties — camera hunting takes twice the man that gun hunting takes.” — Carl E. Akeley, In Brightest Africa (1927).
He knew what he was talking about as he had made such documentaries, and in 1921 filmed the first documentary sequences of living gorillas in the wild, using his special field camera. Later the Komodo Dragons were given the same treatment with an Akeley Camera (Lovecraft later also saw the Komodo Dragons in captivity in New York). Given documentary material like this, undoubtedly shown in cinema newsreels in Providence, and the hero-worship of Akeley to be found in magazines such as Popular Science, it seems to me inconceivable that Lovecraft would not have been aware if the implications of naming his ethnographic folklorist photographer/recorder “Akeley”. Nor, thus, of the final section in which he has Akeley himself become a preserved ‘trophy head’ akin to those of the big-game hunters of the 1920s.
An exhibition, “Mr Akeley’s Movie Camera” is on now at the Field Museum in Chicago and closes 17th March 2019.