Albert Dixon Simmons

Albert Dixon Simmons, naturalist, outdoors photographer, author, and guide

Archive Representative: John W. Flynn, Jr. adsimphoto@gmail.com https://www.fastcatchpress.com

Albert Dixon Simmons (1891-1972) was a pioneer in nature action photography and film making, their uses in studying avian flight mechanics, and the uses of early Kodachrome color films. He authored two photography books in association with noted sporting genre publisher and editor Eugene V. Connett III.

A native of Prince Edward Island and 1916 MIT graduate (Architecture), the Great Depression forced a focus shift to his passion for the outdoors, at first using motion picture cameras to reveal the technical nuances of avian wing motion. Soon after, by adapting a Leica 35mm camera mount to a simulated rifle stock with open gun sights, Simmons “shot” fast-moving birds in flight, with revealing and elegant still images collectively published as Wing Shots (1936, Derrydale Press, NY). With its release noted by Time magazine, each of the 83 Wing Shots images was a gravure print made from a corresponding mounted, titled and signed black & white photograph. The images spoke for themselves, with no accompanying text beyond the dust jacket notes, Foreword, and List of Illustrations.

Selected images were included in E. Leitz’s promotional Leica touring exhibits, the 1937 Leica Annual, 1938 Leica Manual, print ads, and articles Simmons published in Nature and Field & Stream magazines. Also in 1936, he became involved with the first generation of Kodachrome 16mm motion picture and 35mm transparency films, traveling to the US Gulf Coast and Bird Rock (Rocher aux Oiseaux) in Canada to document migratory species with some of the first color images and films of birds in the wild.

Wing Shots mounted black and white prints comprise nearly all of Simmons’s signed works. He made only a few personal prints from Bird Rock images and a handful of prints after the 1930s, preferring transparencies for slide show presentations. He wrote and photographed commercially for wartime and sporting publications and equipment manufacturers, was Outdoors editor for the Cleveland News, provided radio commentary, and maintained long-term relationships with the Cleveland Zoo and Cleveland Museum of Natural History. He contracted as guide/photographer for hunting and fishing expeditions, with his experiences from Alaska to Africa culminating in Photography for Sportsmen (1951, D. van Nostrand, NY), a detailed how-to guide for nature and outdoors photographers and filmmakers.

Each year, Simmons and his wife summered in her native Nova Scotia, combining family, friends, and work, until his death there in 1972. His cameras and extensive library, many negatives, transparencies, prints, and motion pictures, were sold, given away, or misplaced in the ensuing years. However, the majority of original Wing Shots negatives, many early Kodachromes, and unpublished medium format images depicting Maritime province life in the 1950’s and early ‘60s, were kept by his daughter but remained idle for decades.

In 2011, the chance internet discovery of a misidentified manuscript about Bird Rock, hand-assembled by Simmons and begun over 70 years earlier, resolved a family mystery that he was attempting to complete a third book in his last years, though nothing was found after his passing. Early in 1972 and in failing health, Simmons had sent the manuscript to the colleague who accompanied him to Bird Rock thirty-five years earlier, in 1937, as a gesture of friendship and thanks. Against extreme odds, it rejoined the Simmons archive, which is managed by his grandson.

The George Eastman House keeps a small number of Simmons’s transparencies in its permanent collection as examples of first-generation Kodachrome and glass slide mounting technique. Princeton University’s Firestone library houses Eugene Connett’s papers, which include correspondences between his Derrydale Press, E. Leitz, Inc. (Leica), and Simmons.