The original surfing hippo: Nature meets the museum in ‘Wild: Michael Nichols’

At the preview for Wild: Michael Nichols, opening June 27 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, world-famous nature photographer Michael “Nick” Nichols greeted guests in khakis and sandals with socks. Since he’s spent his career swatting steamy swarms of gnats alongside jungle chimpanzees, baking on the Serengeti among prides of lions, sloshing in a rock pool frequented by a massive tiger, and battling vertiginous whiteout conditions in the Sequoias of the American Northwest, you can’t blame him for staying comfortable while he can.

Wild is the first major museum exhibition of Nichol’s work, and many of these extraordinary prints are familiar from publications like National Geographic or TIME magazine, which named his image of “surfing hippos” in Gabon (included in this show) one of its “100 Most Influential Images of All Time.”

Camera traps and staying ahead of the law

As Nichols explained, because of the timespan of his career, about half of the photos in the exhibition are digital and half were made with film. Some, like nighttime portraits of lions taken in total darkness, have an eerie immediacy thanks to infrared film. Some pictures were captured with camera in hand; others, like a once-in-a-lifetime shot of a wild tiger leaping right into the frame, are the painstaking work of days and weeks stalking the animals’ haunts and rigging the complex yet durable equipment (a “camera trap”) to capture the creatures remotely with optimal lighting, focus, and exposure.

“I begged not to go jail,” Nichols said of a series of apparently illicit aerial photos of Yellowstone National Park, a few of which also appear here. Other featured shots include work from Nichols’s two book projects: 1999’s Brutal Kinship (with primatologist Jane Goodall as collaborator), documenting the human/chimpanzee relationship in captivity, sanctuaries, and the wild, and 2005’s The Last Place on Earth, following intrepid scientist Mike Fay’s “megatransect” across the Congo Basin.

What you’ll see

Nichols’s work is also paired with pieces from the PMA collection that director and CEO Timothy Rub says explore “how artist have understood the ancient and complex relationship between man and nature.”

Other exhibition highlights include perilous views of crocodiles and poignant stills of baby elephants and the fight against the ivory trade. And the Great Stair Hall displays a monumental pair of 60-foot prints: “portraits” of a giant redwood (1,500 years old) and a Sequoia tree (3,200 years old). Exhibition co-curator Peter Barberie, the PMA’s Brodsky Curator of Photographs, characterized Nichols as “a street photographer who finds his beat in the savannah and forest.”

Still, Nichols said that for all the stunning shots, his career is usually an exercise in frustration: he estimates that he captures only about 1 percent of what he wishes he could.

Next door to the Wild show, the PMA’s annual family program, Art Splash, runs June 27 through September 4, offering in-gallery explorations, workshops, guided tours, performances, and family festivals that relate art to nature.

Nature’s “punch in the gut”

The exhibition also marks the publication of guest co-curator Melissa Harris’s full-length biography of the Alabama native, A Wild Life: A Visual Biography of Photographer Michael Nichols, packed with stories and photos from his long career.

Nichols often works alongside scientists, but he also has his own intuitive, anecdotal, individualized approach to his subjects, Barberie told me — something the curator calls “Nick science.”

Nichols has tremendous respect for his scientist colleagues, and his photos can play an important role in global conservation efforts. But Nichols's true medium is “the magic and wonder of the natural world,” Barberie says. We need the science as much as we need the emotional “punch in the gut” of appreciating nature, and especially given our current political climate, “we’re going to lose both if we’re not careful.”

The Philadelphia Museum of Art presents Wild: Michael Nichols, running June 27 through September 17, 2017.

The lioness photo above is an inkjet print mounted on Dibond, © Michael Nichols/National Geographic.