“I usually wait until an animal settles down where it feels comfortable and happy, instead of trying perform for me.” Suschitzky took his first photographs of animals before the War, when working on a series of zoo films as an assistant cameraman. The keepers would cut holes into the wire fencing and accompany him into the enclosures. Things did not always go smoothly: “I had to grab the camera and run for it when a kangaroo attacked me at Whipsnade, and I only just made the fence. But on the whole, the kind of animal photography which I do is fairly peaceful work.”
The great appeal of these pictures – they were published in magazines, such as Animal and Zoo Magazine or Illustrated, and later as books and series of postcards – is due to the fact that his photographs are animal portraits, rather than zoological specimen pictures showing four legs and a tail. For Suschitzky, Guy, the star of London Zoo, is not just a gorilla; he turns the ape’s feral features into an impressive character study.
First published in 1956, the volume Kingdom of the Beasts, for which Julian Huxley, a former Secretary of the Royal Zoological Society, wrote the text, was translated into several languages. “I’ve kept up my interest in animal photography ever since and wherever I have travelled on my documentary film work I have taken stills of animals. I’ve been to zoos in India,Australia,America, Ireland, Scandinavia, the Far East, Middle Europe, and whenever I could spare a day or two I would stay on to photograph animals.”