 Oliver Pike was a pioneer of natural history photography and cinematography
from the late 1890s, photographing wildlife in its natural surroundings. His
claim to significance lies in the groundbreaking techniques he developed to
capture animals in their natural habitats and in the fact that he passed this
knowledge on. He published 25 books on the subject as well as making over 50
films and giving many lectures.
When still young, he developed his own stills camera, the 'Birdland', so good
that it was bought by a London manufacturer. He later designed a cine-camera for
wildlife photography that was camouflaged so as not to scare away the animals.
He had a profound knowledge of photographic technique, as demonstrated by his
handbooks on photography and cinematography, and by his surviving films, which
contain use of focal planes unprecedented in their time.
According to his own account, once he had made his own first film, In Birdland (1907), he offered it to
the Palace Theatre of Varieties in London's Cambridge Circus, at that time one
of the largest theatres doing regular Cinematograph shows, and the film was such
a draw that it played for six weeks. He made the ground-breaking film St Kilda, It's People and Birds (1908)
around the same time for James Williamson. Pathé then offered him a contract. Here is his account of that early success:
on this afternoon of August 1907 the great theatre was filled with an
enthusiastic [press] audience. Nothing of the kind had been seen before, and
during the fortnight following I received nearly three hundred press clippings
from the daily and weekly journals. The following morning the London papers
appeared with bold headlines above their articles. It was shown at the theatre
each night for a month, then went to the cinemas in the country.... With the
proceeds from this, my first film, I was able to have a cine camera made to my
own specifications. The chief things I had in mind were silent working, easy
portability and thirdly the inter-changeability of lenses of different focal
length.
In Birdland marked Pike's break into filmmaking, a career in which he would
distinguish himself for 30 years.
There seems to have been a hiatus in his film production around the war
years, but in 1921 he went to work for 'old friend' Bruce Woolfe at British
Instructional on the celebrated Secrets of Nature series (1922-33), and later for the similar Secrets of Life (1930-50). His last film was released in 1947, when he was 70.
He was a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, and 300 prints, negatives
and lantern-slides of his work, held by the RPS, are archived in the National
Media Museum in Bradford. This collection was acquired from the London Natural
History Society in 1974 and from the photographer himself. Pike also personally
donated several of his films to the BFI National Archive.
Bryony Dixon
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FILM & TV CREDITS
