Frederick Walter Champion, an ex-soldier in the British Indian Army, an officer of the Imperial Forestry Service [Indian Forest Service] and a pioneering conservationist, took the first photograph of a tiger in the wild in India. A 1921-batch officer, Champion served in the United Provinces (corresponding to approximately present-day Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand) until 1947 and rose to the rank of deputy conservator of forests. A pioneer of the camera trapping technique, he was also credited as a pioneer of wildlife photography in India by Jim Corbett.

Speaking of Corbett, Champion’s undying commitment to conservation inspired him to give up the gun for the camera, and together, they became the founding members of India’s first national park established in 1935, which was renamed Corbett National Park in 1957.

Born on 24 August 1893 in Surrey, England, Champion grew up in a family of nature lovers with his father George Charles Champion, an entomologist. His brother, Sir Harry George Champion, a forester, was credited later on with creating a classification of the forest types of India.

Champion first came to India in the early 1910s, serving in the East Bengal police department until 1916, following which he was commissioned into the British Indian Army Reserve of Officers (Cavalry branch). After World War I and his retirement from the army in the early 1920s, he joined the Imperial Forestry Service. Unlike other officers of his era, he detested the idea of shooting animals for sport and preferred documenting them through wildlife photography.

Tripwire photography

Even before joining the IFS, Champion had tried to obtain an image of a tiger in its natural habitat. As wildlife historian Raza Kazmi noted in a Twitter thread, “It took him 8 long years to finally get these images.” Taken in the Kumaon forests, these images were first published on the front page of ‘The Illustrated London News’ on 3 October 1925 with the accompanying headline, “A Triumph of Big Game Photography: The First Photographs of Tigers in the Natural Haunts”.

Two years later, he came out with a book titled, ‘With Camera in Tiger-Land’. This book set new precedents for publishing “photographs of wild animals, just as they live their everyday lives in the great Indian jungles, away from the every-destroying hand of man” instead of ones marked by these majestic animals........

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