Backstory: Sternfeld’s Elephant
If you’re familiar with Joel Sternfeld’s work, you know the photograph from “American Prospects” of the renegade elephant being hosed-down in the middle of a country road in rural Washington. It’s Sternfeld at his best — that finely-detailed capture of remarkable impermanence. There are other reasons why Mr. Sternfeld’s work works, but it’s rarities like the baby carriage on the Glen Canyon Dam that have stuck with me the most.
Joel Sternfeld – Exhausted Renegade Elephant, Woodland, Washington, June 1979
(from American Prospects)
n: 1979, p: 2003
The photograph is part of the permanent collection at the High Museum in Atlanta, and there’s a current show up called “Look Again“, curated by Asst. Curator of Photography Danielle Avram, that assesses marvels of the photo collection that may not have been viewed in awhile (See: Sommer).
I was talking to Danielle about the show, and Sternfeld’s picture, and she said a museum-goer sent her a link to a newspaper article about the elephant. Here’s the full story of what has happening on a country road in Woodland, Washington on June 27th, 1979.
The story’s pretty tragic, and there’s one paragraph that specifically deals with the circumstances of the photograph:
“A second elephant, Thai, escaped from the farm and refused to return, attracting more than 100 spectators and tying up traffic on a nearby road. The animal was coaxed onto a borrowed flatbed truck and returned to the farm late Wednesday.”
While Morgan Berry, the elephant’s trainer, was killed that day (by a different elephant, in the throes of Musth) his Animal Farm apparently kept operating for awhile. In true internet fashion, one fact led to another, and Berry’s farm is shown to have sold “Thai” to the Houston zoo in 1980, less than a year after the picture was taken. Thanks, elephant database!
Thai’s now the main bull Asian elephant in Houston, and is 43 years old. He’s come a long way from the wilds of Thailand, and along the way, he’s sired 14 elephants, most recently Mac, all of whom have died at relatively young ages. It must say something about the difficulty of raising Asian elephants in captivity, I suppose.
Thai’s even on flickr now. Is Mr. Sternfeld?
(Flickr photos via the Houston Zoo.)
