Christy collection of photographs on Africa

Herbert Lang was born in Germany in 1879, emigrated to the United States in 1903 and joined the staff of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in the same year. In 1906 he represented the Museum on a big-game collecting expedition to Kenya and brought back hundreds of specimens of mammals and birds. He was chosen to lead the Museum's expedition to the Congo in 1909, the first major scientific trip into the Congo Basin and was accompanied by James Chapin, a junior year biology student of Columbia University. The planned two-year expedition lasted five and a half with, again, hundreds of specimens, photographs and watercolours being brought back for the Museum. On his return, Lang prepared, catalogued and preserved the specimens. In 1925 he returned, this time to Angola (then Portuguese West Africa), on another collecting expedition and remained in Africa working at the Transvaal Museum, South Africa, continuing his association with AMNH carrying out several joint projects. Marrying in 1935, Lang took over management of his wife's hotel in Pretoria before finally retiring to a nearby farmhouse where he died in 1957. Lang's reputation was as much for his excellent wildlife and ethnographic photography as his scientific work and he said that he preferred to shoot with his camera rather than his gun.

70 x 99 mm. Screened print showing the head and forefeet of an anteater. Photograph by Herbert Lang, American Museum of Natural History.

This appears as Figure 94 in: Christy, Cuthbert (1924). Big game and Pygmies: experiences of a naturalist in Central African forests in quest of the Okapi, London: Macmillan, facing page 222.

For further biographical information on Lang and the 1909-1915 Expedition see: http://diglib1.amnh.org/intro/intro.html

Indexed

Y304A/227-228 are prints of the same photograph.