Jack Hamm Revealed!!!
First of all, I would like to say that I do have a lot of respect for this book and I find it very valuable and I highy recommend it. HIGHLY RECOMMEND!!!!! This post is also supposed to be funny, its a humor thing, not to be taken too seriosuly, and as a lesson about the dangers of only copying photos without learning about the underlying anatomy as well. That said:
I was looking through some of Melody's old books when I chanced upon an antique animal book published in 1918 for the Nature Lover's library. I flipped through it and smirked at the description of wolves as being bloodthirsty villians. Well, I kept seeing photos that looked highly familiar and at first I dismissed them as being images I'd seen in national geographic or something. Then I saw a snow leopard photo and my memory finally jogged...it was:
Holy crap, Jack hamm had copied the photo from this book! I went back through the old book and compared them to drawings in Hamm's book and sure enough, he had copied them all. At least half, if not then more, of the drawings in Hamm's book were direct copies of photos from the old animal book
only flipped.
In the next one, Hamm was trying to explain how tigers coats can vary by dividing his drawing into different section...
Nice try. Well, now that I know that he human xeroxed these things, it explains why so many of his pictures vary greatly. Some are really poory drawn, others are drawn nicely but look....wrong. Never copy photos of bad taxidermy mounts. Never. It's the road to the dark side.
There are more, way more than I felt like scanning, and it just gets redundant. :D It seems to discredit the body of his work. Was he trying to meet deadlines? Regardless of deadlines, I believe he traced these images and I can't condone tracing for a published work such as this, regardless of permission given or not.