David Liittschwager and Susan Middleton (at right) are Biodiversity Leadership  Award winners who do their work outside the ordinary research institution. Using camera, tripod, and slide projector, they bring their messages to elementary school classrooms and the pages of exquisitely-printed books, and into places where the pleas of neither scientist nor policy maker are commonly heard. (© 1999 Fred Powledge.)

Their impressive World Wide Web site, which is rich with their photographs, is at http://www.endanger
edspecies.org/ (typed as all one word).

The California Academy of Sciences Web address is www.calacademy.org/

David Liittschwager and Susan Middleton

      Obsessed photographers

  Middleton, as photographer at the California Academy of Sciences, was somewhat closer to nature. Even then, most of her work was done in the Academy’s studio and darkroom.

  That was all changed by a Coachella Valley fringe-toed sand lizard. Middleton had taken a photograph of the endangered reptile to accompany a magazine article, and in 1984 the California Nature Conservancy asked to use the picture in a campaign to protect the creature’s Southern California habitat. 

  The campaign was successful, and the lives of the two photographers changed considerably. Now they are among the world’s most articulate and persuasive promoters of biological conservation. 

  Middleton and Liittschwager met in 1985 when she took a year’s leave from the Academy of Sciences to coordinate the production of an Avedon exhibit titled “In the American West.” The meeting coincided with a request from the California Nature Conservancy for photos of two other animals whose habitat is disappearing, the San Joaquin kit fox and the San Joaquin antelope squirrel. 

  This led to a two-year project with the Conservancy to create a suite of twenty-five photos of endangered California species. That project led, in turn, to the photographers’ first of several books and many exhibitions.

Every square inch counts. David Liittschwager and Susan Middleton came to their work as lovers of the outdoors — both are from the Pacific Northwest — and, in her words, as “obsessed photographers,” the result of training in commercial photography, where every square inch of the picture must work to grab the viewer’s attention. They approached their appointment with the kit fox with the same precision they would have devoted to a perfume advertisement. The fox and the squirrel, though, had other plans.

  “The animals were completely impossible to direct,” recalls Middleton. “The kit fox didn’t want to go into the studio that we had created for it.” The “studio” had been set up in a room of a small zoo. “There was something wrong with that end of the room. The kit fox just didn’t like that area. 

  “So we broke the whole thing down and re-set it up in another area, which made no logical sense to us. But then the kit fox came back in and everything was okay. We were fascinated with the difficulty of it, but also with our ability over a two-day period to actually get close with the camera — and by close, I mean like within two feet.” The antelope squirrel, which got its name from its ability to jump several feet straight up, did exactly that and decided to skip the appointment completely, and a search party had to be organized to find him.

  The California Nature Conservancy loved the pictures, and the two obsessed photographers were well on their way to perfecting a style that makes their work stand head and shoulders above ordinary “nature photography.” The experience with the kit fox and the squirrel taught them patience — the need to take the time to get to know their subject and to allow their subject to adjust to them, or at least tentatively suspend its apprehensions about human intruders.

[To Liittschwager-Middleton Page 2]

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