My mentor, George Orwell, wrote a powerful essay about the absurdity of Imperialism entitled “Shooting an Elephant.” Orwell, the author of 1984 and Animal Farm, was then serving as a police officer in Burma when he observed the event described in his essay.
And then there’s the joke by Groucho Marx: “Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I’ll never know.” Back in the 1980s, while running a creative Seacoast business called Ideaworks, my company shot an elephant in our office.
Andy Kaplan, owner of Kinderworks, wanted to prove that his locally-made children’s furniture was super sturdy. Andy hired a baby elephant to stand on a table manufactured at his seacoast factory. He hired my colleague, Ralph Morang, to take the picture. When it was over, our production team posed with the little guy.
I don’t recall how we got him up to the second-floor photo studio. I think he rode up in the elevator. Here, pulled from the Idewaorks archives, is the unretouched results. From left to right: Illustrator Scott Hill, writer J. Dennis Robinson, the elephant, photographer Ralph Morang, and designer Ann Wilcox. (Courtesy Ralph Morang)
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