Photographs taken in the moments before tragedy strikes pose an especial fascination for us, as exemplified by such widely-circulated images as those supposedly depicting a tourist atop
Photographs of this nature tend to be rare, as they require that the victim have a camera readily at hand and the presence of mind to stolidly snap away as the final moments of his life flash before his eyes, or to capture by happenstance a danger to which he was oblivious at the time. The former is the circumstance claimed of the picture displayed below, purportedly taken by a wildlife photographer just before he was mauled to death in his tent by a bear:
Michio Hoshino, a photographer known for his pictures of bears and other wildlife, was mauled to death by a brown bear on the Kamchatka Peninsula in eastern Russia. He was in his
mid-40'sand lived in Fairbanks, Alaska. This is the last photo he took.
The putative victim named in the text accompanying this image,