I MARRIED ADVENTURE

Martin and Osa Johnson were adventurers from the great state of Kansas. The state motto of Kansas is Ad Astra per Aspera - to the stars and beyond. And these explorers from my native state lived up to the motto. From 1917 to death of Martin in 1937, the Johnsons traveled the globe from the South Pacific and across the African continent. They documented their adventures both in books and on film. They captured and recorded "exotic" wildlife and people never before witnessed by insular American eyes. The films such as Among the Cannibal Isles of the South Seas, Trailing African Wild Animals, Congorilla, and Baboona definitely carry the cultural prejudices and Western entitlement of the era. But they also capture an era of wonder and discovery that is forever lost.

You can learn more about the Johnson's by visiting the Martin and Osa Johnson Museum in Chanute, Kansas where their treasures are on display and their films are regularly screened. Much information and many dvds and copies of their books are available on the museum's website. A wealth of stills from their films can be found at the George Eastman House. These Midwestern adventurers shaped ethnographic film and helped establish the genre of wildlife documentary, forever fixating our engagement with the unknown, the new and the bizarre.