A Collection of 2 Books by Frederick Walter Champion
• Frederick Walter Champion, The Jungle in Sunlight and Shadow, London: Chatto and Windus, 1933
xvi + 270 pages including frontispiece and 95 black and white plates; original cloth boards with gilt text at the spine
25.5 x 19.5 cm
• Frederick Walter Champion, With a Camera in Tiger-Land, London: Chatto and Windus, 1927
xviii, 228 pages including frontispiece and 73 black and white plates; original blue cloth boards with gilt text at the spine
10 x 7 in (25 x 19 cm)
Frederick Walter Champion, a former British Indian Army soldier, Imperial Forestry Service [Indian Forest Service] officer, and pioneering conservationist, captured the first image of a tiger in the wild in India. Champion, a 1921 batch officer, served in the United Provinces (present-day Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand) until 1947, rising to the rank of deputy conservator of forests. Jim Corbett hailed him as a pioneer of wildlife photography in India, as well as a pioneer of the camera trapping technique.
Speaking of Corbett, Champion's unwavering devotion to conservation led him to give up the gun for the camera, and together they founded India's first national park in 1935, which was renamed Corbett National Park in 1957.
Champion was born on August 24, 1893, in Surrey, England, into a family of nature lovers, including his father, entomologist George Charles Champion. Sir Harry George Champion, a forester, was subsequently credited with developing a categorization of India's forest kinds.
When Champion initially arrived in India in the early 1910s, he worked as a police officer in East Bengal until 1916, when he received a commission into the British Indian Army Reserve of Officers (Cavalry branch). He joined the Imperial Forestry Service in the early 1920s after World War I after his retirement from the army. He disliked the concept of killing animals for fun, in contrast to other officers of his period, and chose to capture images of them through wildlife photography.
Champion had already tried to capture a photo of a tiger in its natural environment before joining the IFS. It took him 8 long years to capture these photographs. These photos, which were taken in the Kumaon forests, were first featured under the heading "A Triumph of Big Game Photography: The First Photographs of Tigers in the Natural Haunts" on the front page of "The Illustrated London News" on October 3, 1925.
He published a book titled "With Camera in Tiger-Land" two years later. With the publication of "photographs of wild animals just as they live their everyday lives in the great Indian jungles, away from the every-destroying hand of man," as opposed to photographs showing these majestic animals fleeing from beaters or about to be shot by hunters, this book established new standards for the publication of wildlife images.
He used a painstaking method known as "trip-wire photography" to take these pictures. "A tiger (or any other animal) stumbled on a wire carefully hidden below his typical walking path and took his own picture, generally by night as the flashes connected to the wire went off simultaneously."
Champion described this process in a letter accompanying the piece in ‘The Illustrated London News,’ “These photographs are quite unique, no satisfactory photographs ever having been taken before, to my knowledge, of tigers in their native haunts.” Going further, he stated, “The flash is so sudden that he probably takes it for a flash of lightning.”
The effects of this strategy have been extensive. This method has been improved throughout the years and is now referred to as "camera trap photography." This technique is still used by conservationists to count tigers and track their whereabouts.
Tigers visited only 18 of Champion's 200 camera traps. He had 11 photos of nine different animals in all, but this was enough to show how each species had unique stripe patterns. This was a notable change in every way. Over the last three decades, experts all over the world have learned to discern a tiger's stripes using significantly more modern cameras and algorithms. It is currently a commonly used technology across the world, and its inventor was a deputy conservator of woods over a century ago.
He died in 1970 at the age of 76, but the legacy he leaves behind is astounding. He was a visionary who advocated for a robust forest department in India. He thought humans owed it to wild creatures like the tiger and their forest habitats to protect them.
(Set of two)
This lot will be shipped in "as is" condition. For further details, please refer to the images of individual lots as reference for the condition of each book.