Anthropology and Photography at the American Museum of Natural History

In addition to thousands of physical specimens, the expedition members also brought back 624 negatives, including innovative and cutting edge night photographs of tropical frogs and toads (AMNH, AR 1922 81). The four photographs which inhabit Card 73 are distinct in this expedition’s collection in that they contain no amphibians or reptiles or even animals of any kind. Instead, they offer a glimpse into the human side of a scientific expedition, including the roles that colonialism and gender have played in the production, codification, and preservation of Western forms of scientific knowledge. As four different photographs united by a common expedition, common scientists, and perhaps, common motives, much remains unknown about those whose faces are frozen in the photographs and the impulses and itineraries of those behind the camera. What follows in this paper is an exploration of and meditation on the questions prompted by viewing these photos and doing research into the American Museum of Natural History’s role in capturing, collecting, and conserving these photographs. Who is behind the camera and who are those faces in front of the camera? What are the needs and motivations of each group that have united them in this frozen moment of recording and recollection? What is the relationship between these two agents and how are they performing their roles within the institutionalized gender and colonial roles of 1922?

For the collection of photographs on card 73, the idea of an ultimate truth to their origin, inhabitants and context, may be, as Pinney describes, “in retreat” (1992 83). Initially, for photographic collections like that at the American Museum of Natural History, principal faith was placed in the “denotative power” of the photographic image, drawn directly by the “pencil of nature” with little space for a connotative power of photography (Pinney 1992 87). In this interpretive schema, with much of the denotation of these photographs lost to the past or unavailable to this researcher, the connotative power of these photographs has become central, allowing for an interpretation based not only on the shreds of context available to denote possible histories but also, primarily, on the connotations through observation for this researcher. Within this examination, there is no clear master narrative; instead, these photographs, preserved and yet living images of Samana, Santo Domingo, provide the narrative, organization, and motivation for each section of this analysis. My hope is that the small fragments of context found in the Museum’s library may both fill in a few of the answers to these questions, but, moreover, they may open new avenues of interrogation, enriching the representational and semantic power of these photographs. Critical questions are drawn from direct viewing and engagement of these hybrid photographic objects and necessary theoretical background and analysis is brought in to supplement, rather than supplant, the primacy of the objects, both the individual photographs and their identity as a combined unit.

Watching from Behind the Camera, Living Inside of the Photograph: The Angelo Hielprin Expedition to Santo Domingo, 1922

In front of the camera, as permanent objects on the visual plane of the photograph, stand women and children and the landscape of Samana, Santo Domingo. Finding those who stand behind the camera required more research into the archives and publications of the American Museum of Natural History. Gladwyn Kingsley Noble, recently promoted to Associate Curator of Herpetology, was the leader of the 1922 Heilprin Expedition; this young curator had a life-long interest not only in the life histories of reptiles and amphibians but also in the complexities of animal behavior and the mental life of animals (“Dr G.K. Noble Dies…” 1940 25). Well-aware of the power of specimens in display and the influence of the camera, Noble had even given a prize-winning oration in his youth entitled “Hunting with a Camera” (R. Noble to W.K. Gregory, 11 Dec 1941). Much like his contemporaries at the museum, the camera was a means to contextualize and provide evidence for the collected physical specimens in order to recreate vivid and realistic life groups in the halls of the American Museum. In addition, Noble advanced the incorporation of local communities in the collection of specimens, particularly children who could be easily enticed with “enthusiasm and interest” to collect frogs and toads for a small incentive, usually 1 cent per specimen (G.K. Noble 1922 “Suggestions to Collectors of Reptiles and Amphibians”).

The 1922 Expedition was of deep personal importance for Noble who described first seeing a preserved specimen of the Giant Tree Frog, Hyla Vasta, at an exhibition in his college days and contemplating that “for half a century many individuals have gazed at this specimen of Hyla vasta, the only one known, and have no doubt wondered, as did I, how the creature looked in life, what was the character of its voice, and what the length of the leap it could take with its tremendous legs” (G.K. Noble 1923 105). Noble’s inspiration in the face of the unknown mirrors the impulse behind this exploration the photographic objects left behind form his expedition. More than 85 years later, viewing these photographs, I am constantly left with questions about the individuals within them – what of the sound of “how they looked in life,” their voice and their laughter, what of their thoughts and motions in the moments before and after that click of a shutter?

In addition to G.K. Noble, the primary expedition group employed for “frog hunting” in the mountain range of Quita Espuela near the port city of Samana included a US Marine Sergeant named Schroff, an employed local guide named Juan Herrera, and Noble’s wife, Ruth Crosby Noble, who worked as an Assistant Curator in the Department of Public Education at the Museum (G.K. Noble 1923 106; AMNH AR 1922 30). The implications of Sergeant Schroff and the military occupation of Santo Domingo will be explored in depth later. Unfortunately, like the individuals in these photographs, little is known about Juan Herrera, a local guide who faithfully accompanied and aided the Nobles in all practical aspects of their expedition including lodging, food and the collection of over 3500 specimens. Most of what is known about the other participants in the Expedition is written form the perspective of Noble who published two different articles in Natural History about his experience on the Expedition (G.K. Noble 1923).

Ruth Crosby Noble graduated from Wellesley College in 1919 and, in later years, wrote fondly to the Museum’s staff of her happiness at being offered a position in the Department of Public Education after graduation (Letter Dec 15, 1940). At the Museum, Ruth was in charge of special education programs for blind children and for loaning small traveling nature collections to the public libraries in NYC (AMNH AR 1922 45-6). I was unable to find an account of the Heilprin Expedition from Ruth Noble’s perspective and little is mentioned of her actions in Santo Domingo except for her competence in assisting her husband in collecting new frog species in the night (G.K. Noble 1923). Less than a year after the end of the expedition, on October 1, 1923, Ruth Crosby Noble resigned from her position in the Department of Public Education with no explicit reason given in the Annual Report (AMNH AR 1923 33, 78) although she remained active in the Staff Wives Group and earned her Masters in Education from Columbia (Grapevine May/June 1988).

Due to G.K. Noble’s fascination with his herpetological fieldwork (G.K. Noble 1923), I imagine that Ruth Noble may have been the one to spend time in the coastal town in Samana, visiting schools and dressmaker’s like those pictured in photographs 399 to 401. In photographs 399 and 400, the children pictured are being taught at what is only vaguely captioned as a “private school” in or near Samana, Santo Domingo. In her four years at the Museum, one of Ruth Crosby Noble’s primary duties was to contact schools for blind students and arrange systematized educational visits which became a central part of the these school’s Curriculum (AMNH AR 1922 45). This teaching included large-relief globes and tactile objects like taxidermy animals, nests and shells from the “Nature Room” at the Museum. Given this expertise, it may be reasonable to infer that the children in this school may also be segregated or possibly disabled in this way and that perhaps this is the reason for the caption “private school.” On the other hand, these may be children of the rather privileged members of the Samana community, children of the leaders or perhaps of American military or bureaucratic personnel during the occupation.

The didactic nature of these photographs with children posed at the blackboard and other children eagerly staring at the camera as if waiting for a response to some as yet unanswered question leads me to believe that Ruth Noble was at least present for their taking if not the one holding the camera. Here, the intersection of Western models of education, or indoctrination, and the military occupation of Santo Domingo add additional levels of interpretation to these photographs. As living artifacts in the museum’s collection, these photographs must be explored with regard to the “configurations of power and the politics of representation” from the time in which they were taken to the present (Edwards and Hart 2003 52). From Ruth Noble’s role as a Western educator visiting a school of uncertain (religious, colonial, local?) authority to the Expedition’s Marine escort, the Nobles can be seen not simply through their authority as scientific bearers and collectors of Western knowledge but also as having at their back the physical and intellectual hegemony of Western colonialism.

These photographs powerfully convey the “raw histories” of the time in which they were taken as well as our own time; these incisive and uninhibited images both teach and challenge the histories of American intervention and imperialism in Santo Domingo (Edwards 2001 3). The island itself was a long-standing contact zone, marking some of the first exchanges between Columbus and Tainos and the enactment of Western dominance over the indigenous populations of the “New World” (“Dominican Republic…”). In the 20th century, after a decade of political intervention in the volatile politics of Santo Domingo, US Marines entered the country in May of 1916, instituting a military government which was deeply unpopular with the Dominican people (“Dominican Republic…”). Rear Admiral Harry Knapp became the leader of the country and filled his cabinet with US Naval Officers, due partly to Dominican leaders’ unwillingness to cooperate with the occupation. From 1916 until the early 1920s, the US military continued to subjugate the Dominican people with counterinsurgency tactics in the eastern part of the island, in the regions South of Samana.

These colonialized spaces and identities form a backdrop for the Heilprin Expedition even more so because G. Kingsley Noble and Ruth Noble were accompanied by a Sergeant in the US Marines, who, in 1922, continued to occupy the island even as the first national presidential elections in six years were being held (“Dominican Republic….”). As representatives of the United States, a clear colonial power in Santo Domingo, the Noble’s choice to photograph not just herpetology specimens but also local inhabitants must be viewed with a critical eye on the direction of power and elements of coercion or manipulation that may be involved in interactions with local and indigenous populations during the Expedition.

Now, with these personal and colonial contexts, the Heilprin Expedition may be seen not simply as a scientific exploration to collect specimens of rhinoceros iguana and giant tree frogs, but rather as a reinforcement of the colonial hegemonic discourses in knowledge production. Like imperial powers before them, while the Heilprin Expedition explicitly sought to observe, collect and catalogue reptiles and amphibians, the Expedition implicitly participated in the observation, collection and categorization of human beings through the photographs seen here. G. Kingsley Noble conducted his expedition with the open support of the US Marines and the Santo Domingo military forces both of which he thanked in the Museum’s Annual Report (AR 1922 30). Ruth Noble, trained in the educational methods of her time, may also have turned to the local schools, children and women of Samana with a sense of colonial paternalism. By providing this context of the personal and political background to the expedition, this analysis hopes to dismantle the “longed-for invisibility of its producer,” here, the unknown actor-photographers of the Heilprin Expedition (Pinney 1992 76). This renewal of visibility and agency for both those behind and in front of the camera will continue to be explored in the following direct readings and analysis of the photographs.

Inside the “Land of Mystic Exaggerations”: A Detailed Analysis

Like photograph 400, a print reversed from its negative, I have chosen to work through the narrative structure of these photographs in reverse of their numbered and placement order on the card. Photograph 401A, taken from the deck of the SS Iroquois, the steamship which brought the Noble’s both to and from Santo Domingo, reveals the cultural and colonial landscape of this port city in Samana. As part of a long and mountainous peninsula, this small town occupies much of the beach and lowlands and houses continue to climb up into the hills as well. In front of one of the highest buildings, there are large white letters that spell out “Samana” only visible with a magnifying glass. With these white letters, the landscape actively tries to name itself, taking control of the power of the photographer to capture and control through captioning. This landscape also sets the stage for the gendered and colonial interactions which will occur onshore, recorded in photographs 399 to 401. Several buildings along the shore match the layout of the schoolhouse with its tall wooden doors flung open in 399 and 400 and one of them may even be the building itself.
Once the expedition was on shore, as G.K. Noble’s essay entitled “In Pursuit of the Giant Tree Frog” recounts, Noble describes the jungle at night as “a land of mystic exaggerations” where “colors lose their values,” proportions widen and shadows invade (1923 109). Much of this description, particularly the lack of coloring and the contrast of shadows and light, parallels the startling visuality and potential visual distortion of photography in which the stopping of time allows the photograph to become a frozen moment of “mystic exaggerations.” This metaphor of “mystic exaggerations” proves fruitful as I seek to synthesize both the broader context of the Heilprin Expedition and the intricate specificity of these photographs as distinct visual objects.

Photo 401, captioned simply as “the dressmaker’s family,” invites the viewer into both the domestic and economic life of this unnamed dressmaker and her children. Her home is filled with the tools of her trade, including two sewing machines, hanging dresses and fabric, and a dress form. However, these tools, so integral to her livelihood, inhabit the periphery of the photograph as does the dressmaker herself, standing set off slightly behind a wall in the rear right side of the photograph. Instead, her children are centered and central as two young girls look down into the cradle at an infant. A young boy stands, barefoot, in the center of the photograph; possibly unable to contain his energy for the duration of the camera’s exposure time, his features are a blur of motion. The presence of two sewing machines suggest a further blurring between the lines of profession and family as it is highly likely that one of the older daughters is helping her mother, perhaps with simple tasks like sewing hems and mending buttons.

Much like professional Western photographic portraiture, family inheritance exists as an undercurrent in this unconventional portrait as the knowledge and craft of the seamstress, and, hence, the relative economic stability which accompanies a trade, are visually being passed from mother to daughter. The woman in the background, embodying the dual roles of mother and seamstress, gazes neither at the photographer nor quite at her children but off into the depths of the room towards the tools of her trade. Maybe she is contemplating how much more mending she must do before preparing dinner or perhaps she imagines her daughters, someday grown women with their own families to tend to, toiling away at the sewing machines. I imagine Ruth Noble, a relatively young woman behind the camera, seeing aspects of her own future in this domestic scene. With plans to leave her career at the Museum, Ruth may have seen her own professional sphere diminishing as the demands of a feminized domestic sphere, including raising her own children, came into the foreground. These two women together, the dressmaker and Ruth Noble, face their own set of challenges due to the restrictions of gender roles within two very different societies; in this moment of the photograph, there is a sense of union within these two experiences as the complexities of femininity, family, and identity conflict and combine.

Indicating the self-reflexive nature of these photographs, in each of the interior shots of both the dressmaker’s home and of the schoolhouse, portrait-style photographs hang prominently as the sole ornamentation to otherwise stark quarters. In the dressmaker’s home, on a high shelf to the left of the photograph sits a photo of an infant in a clean white dress, perhaps as part of a Baptism, Christening or some other sort of special, ceremonial event. Perhaps this is the child in the cradle over whom his two older sisters watch assiduously. In photograph 400 inside of the schoolhouse, there hang two portrait-style photographs on wall and above the board, each depicting a woman in white, possibly part of a couple. In the small photograph over the blackboard, this woman is clearly in formal white dress, carefully posed for the occasion.

Like the “special” occasions in these photographs, the children of both the dressmaker and at the school are dressed in white, suggesting that the taking of these photos was seen as an uncommon and therefore celebratory occasion. The posing of these children in what may be some of their best clothes for presentation to a Western educator and scientist reflects a colonial presence within Western educational models for indigenous models which sought to enlighten and Westernize children to create docile subjects. Starting with the dressmaker’s young son who is blurred in motion, several portions of these photographs rebel from the dominating structure of strict posing. A few of the children in 399, now dirtied either in person or through the distortion of the negative in the printing process, look off into another room, directing their attention away from the photographer and the performance of a calculated and educated Western identity.

Forever frozen in a reversed time, the sense of these photos as a “landscape of mystic exaggerations” is further heightened in Photograph 400. At first glance the photograph seems to be a normal print, children seated and teacher standing, all facing the camera. However, further examination reveals that what the child at the blackboard has written is backwards, unraveling the mystic visual reversal that silently underpins this photograph. In this “private” schoolroom, the children seem more focused on photographer than on the child at the board but that child at the blackboard had directed all of her energy into what she is writing. The girl at the board continues to perform what is expected of her, carefully writing out the lesson for a class that is posed in such a way where they cannot even see her hard work. This disjuncture between performer and audience lends the photograph an unreal quality.

Adding to this haunting quality, the small girl at the front of the seated group stares at the camera with a burning intensity, perhaps of desire or detestation. At first glance, this small child holds much of the viewer’s attention with her pale skin, wide eyes and clean face; she compels the viewer to ask who she is and what she is thinking. Through her intensity, she drives the attention away from the child at the board and her teacher, urging the viewer to ask questions about the ramifications of a frozen education and community. In each of these photographs, entire lives and identities are captured and contained: a family, framed by a mother’s profession, and children and teacher forever transfixed in this artificial lesson. What has photography done to these identities? Are they revealed or concealed? With their faces frozen on film in the archives of a major Western museum, are they preserved or neglected, remembered or forgotten?

Perhaps the answers to these questions lie in the absences within the visuality and context of these photographs. In photo 400, an adult, also dressed in white has clearly chosen to position her face and most of her body behind one of the schoolroom doors, leaving only a fragment of herself, her legs, in a chair positioned next to the open door on the right. In this frame, there are now two grown women, likely the teachers, one standing in profile with her face staring at the camera, the other vaguely off camera, rejecting the seduction of the camera lens. In the next photograph, 399, this hidden teacher reappears, still seated and now on the left side of the photograph. The standing teacher is now gone, perhaps behind the doors or perhaps she has left the area altogether, completing the rebellion of her colleague from the snare of Western science and documentation.

With unclear captions or documentation for these photographs, the question of what kind of “private school” this small wooden schoolhouse is continues to plague this researcher. Are these the children of authority figures within the community or children gathered from the nearby jungles in order to be enlightened? With their varying skin tones, perhaps these children are a combination of the two, part of a microcosm of the Santo Domingo contact zone. I imagine the daughters of US Marine Sergeants alongside the sons of local farmers and fisherman; with this context, these children have the potential to simultaneously perform and break from the colonial landscape which they inhabit. Within the shadows of the photographic jungles “mystic exaggerations,” these children, with their small rebellions and undeniable agency, may bend, and even break, the boundaries of colonial identities even while they are forced to pose within a colonial structured photograph.

Similarly surprising observations arise as we follow the display and arrangement of pupils between the two photographs. In contrast to photograph 400 in which the children were sitting in chairs close to the door while their teacher stands to the side, the children in 399 are barely recognizable as they stand in the back of the schoolhouse, darkened by shadows. The order of the children has been shuffled, disconnecting the viewer from the previous photograph. It soon becomes clear, however, that these are the same children from the previous photograph as your view falls upon the small, entrancing girl with the vivid stare, now standing in the third row of children with only her small face visible. In 399, the children seem dirtied, possibly from playing outside, but this may also be a photographic trick of less light exposure to the negative or of a rather dirty printing surface. Notably, the left door of the schoolhouse also seems markedly dirtier, suggesting that, at least some of the grayness which has befallen these children is due to photographic manipulation. Additionally, the children seem less mesmerized by the idea of posing for the camera, many of them look antsy now that they must stand and several look off to the side. An older girl at the blackboard now looks away from her work and directly at the camera, interrogating the photographer and the viewer with her sharp gaze. Her printed title fades into the loss of time as only the words “Viva” and “escuela” are still legible. Poignantly, she recognizes that the artificial lesson of the day will soon be forgotten, but her unnamed face will continue to be visible yet invisible in the museum archives.

Inside the Archives: The Life of Photographic Objects Inside the Museum

In their current home in the Photographic Archives of the Museum’s Library, the photographs of card 73 “live” in a drawer inside of a folder with other photos from the 1922 Heilprin Expedition in a drawer labeled Department of Invertebrate Zoology. This material location is just as integral to the heterogeneous meanings of these photographs as the materiality of the photographic objects themselves. Hundreds of photos, each in sets of four to uniform cards, display a wide variety of frogs and reptiles, some alive and some dead, along with scattered photographs of young boys helping the researchers collect specimens and Dominican cooking fires deep in the tropical forests. In these few photographs, the crackling of the fires and the deep shadows characteristic of night photography provide even more mysteries and more questions to be asked for another paper and perhaps another researcher. For my purposes, the accompanying photographs from the Heilprin Expedition continue to demonstrate the contrasting agenda and result of the expedition itself, namely, critical scientific observation and collection alongside an amateur curiosity and desire to photograph the natives. Perhaps, like explored above, this desire to photograph comes from an impulse to educate and to reflexively observe the cultural, economic and educational practices of another society; however, these photographs may also reflect a lingering curiosity of the indigenous other in the Western intellectual and cultural consciousness.

Card 73 and its location in the Heilprin folder in the American Museum’s Library also serve to create “synthetic objects…upon which sense and order have been imposed in their institutional lifetimes, creating something that was not there before, making a new entity both intellectually and physically” (Edwards and Hart 2003 49). Here, that “synthetic object” is the page of photographs, united by multiple classificatory systems, but without any explanation for their direct relationship to each other and to other photographs in the drawer, typical documentary photographs of reptiles and amphibians being collected in the field interspersed with photographs of local children and adults who aided in the collection of these specimens. The totality of the photographs together, now a “synthetic unitary object” (55), are simply labeled by the Expedition and placed in a drawer for the “Department of Invertebrate Zoology.” The photographs of individuals called Card 73 are now Zoological through classification, disconnected from possible connections with other facets of the Museum administration such as the Department of Anthropology.

These photographs also gain new meanings and life histories by their changes in categorization and classification within the museum. Each photograph is labeled with three separate numbering systems. The designations as 399, 400, 401 and 401A reflect the original numbering when the photos were processed, collected and printed probably soon after the expedition (Mathe). The longer numbers, like 234B:331, reflect an attempt to restructure the collection that, as explained to me by Barbara Mathe, failed after only a few years. The photographs continue to bear these numbers as an artifact of the constant evolution of museum procedure and policy and the flux of priorities and agendas which the objects of a collection may be used for. The final number, 248, etc., is the only number of the three which reflects some workable knowledge, directing the viewer to the filing system for the photographs’ negatives. An initial search by Barbara Mathe turned up no negatives in the appropriate files; there are many possible explanations for these missing negatives: perhaps they are made of nitrate and have been removed for the safety of the rest of the collection, perhaps they were simply removed or lost at an earlier date. The photographs on card 73 remain powerful visual objects even without their ability to serve as clear referents for other portions of the collection. Lacking the original vs. reproduction relationship to negatives, they must now stand of and for themselves, preserving and protecting the moments which they reflect.

In their current home, these photographs frequently suffer from the “invisibility” of being museum archival objects which have become “naturalized within institutional structure, their own social biographies as objects obscured and denied precise critical attention” (Edwards and Hart 2003 48). The very act of storing these items in the library’s archives, separating them from the research of departments, the exhibition floors, and other spheres of the Museum, solidifies the lower status of these photographs as museum objects and may somewhat explain their swift separation from context, field notes, and other frames of reference. Archival and object-driven projects like this one provide the museum’s audience with the ability to recover from invisibility these objects and use them for producing new meanings and narratives for these objects. However, within the institution of the Museum itself, these photographs seem to remain invisible, preserved but uninterrogated.

Conclusion: Reversed Visualities, Renewed Meanings

Photographs, like those explored here from Card 73, counter the continuous narrative of history and knowledge with the punctum, that “inexplicable point of incisive clarity”, frozen yet engaging, demanding yet discursive (Edwards 2001 1). Perhaps the underlying clarity of photograph 400 is not the captivating child in the front row or the details in the room but rather the entire photograph itself which preserves a moment reflected, refracted and reversed. Through this act of rebellion and reversal, this visual object turns visuality and the reality which it is called upon to document back upon itself, leaving the viewer feeling a slight discomfort with their own senses, confused about the documentary “evidence” he has in hand. Here, the photograph’s power as an object rather than as evidence or memory shines through; this printing, with the negatives mysteriously missing, may now be the only way in which this image exists in the world, entering the deft and dangerous world of the “unique” museum object (Edwards and Hart 2003 58). Even without the value-laden label of uniqueness, this visual object and the others which surround it and make up card 73 are undoubtedly objects in their own right, imbued with a long and winding life history and with the invocative power of both visuality and materiality. In the transposed world of photograph 400 where the writing may be scrawled in a perfectly backwards script, light continues to reflect out to the viewer from the face of an entranced and entrancing nameless young girl who casts her gaze not only upon the photographer but also upon us and the photographic object itself. Her piercing gaze from within a crafted and reversed world is direct and directing, cutting through the boundaries between visual reality and distortion and calling the viewer into communion with the photograph’s fluid levels of meaning and interpretation.

Susan Sheffler, NYU Museum Studies

Works Cited

American Museum of Natural History. 1922. Annual Report.
http://digitallibrary.amnh.org/museum/annual_reports/datelist. [6 March 2009].

American Museum of Natural History. 1923. Annual Report.
http://digitallibrary.amnh.org/museum/annual_reports/datelist. [6 March 2009].

"Dominican Republic: Occupation by the United States, 1916-1924." Country Studies. Available
from Library of Congress, Federal Research Division.
http://countrystudies.us/dominican-republic/10.htm. [25 March 2009].

“DR. G.K. NOBLE DIES, NOTED SCIENTIST: Discovered Strange Creatures on Expeditions--Two
Halls at Museum His Monuments.” The New York Times. 10 Dec 1940, Page 25.

Edwards, E. 2001. Raw Histories: Photography, Anthropology, and Museums. Oxford: Berg. Pg 1-
50.

Edwards, E. and Hart, J. 2003. Mixed Box: The Cultural Biography of a Box of Ethnographic
Photographs. IN Photographs, Objects, Histories: On the Materiality of Images. London: Routledge.

Grapevine. Staff Newsletter, American Museum of Natural History. May/June 1988.

Mathe, Barbara, Archivist and Librarian of American Museum of Natural History Library.
Interview by author, March 17, 2009, New York, NY.

Noble, G.K. 1923. Trailing the Rhinoceros Iguana in Santo Domingo. Natural History. Vol XXIII
(6): 541-558.

Noble, G.K. 1923. In Pursuit of the Giant Tree Frog: Night Hunting in Santo Domingo by the
Angelo Heilprin Expedition. Natural History Vol XXIII (2): 105-121.

Noble, R.C. Letter to Museum Staff. American Museum of Natural History, Library Archives. 15
Dec 1940.

Noble, R.C. Letter to William King Gregory. American Museum of Natural History, Library
Archives. 11 Dec 1941

Pinney, C. 1992. The Parallel Histories of Photography and Anthropology. In E. Edwards.
Anthropology and Photography. Yale: University Press.