A collection of photographs of Moscow taken by a chimp trained during the Soviet era will be sold at Sotheby's London on June 5 in its auction Changing Focus - A Collection of Russian and Eastern European Contemporary Photography.
![]() Mikki's photographs have been signed by his trainers |
The collection of 18 prints, each signed (not by the chimp) and numbered 4/10, will sell for £50,000-70,000 ($76,105-106,547).
The idea for the photographs came from Vitaliy Komar and Alexander Melamid, founders of the Moscow conceptualism movement of the 1970s.
![]() Mikki's out of focus shots 'reference millions of photos taken by tourists on a daily basis', according to Sotheby's |
Entitled Our Moscow through the Eyes of Mikki, they were created as part of the duo's Collaboration with Animals project, which began in 1978 with a drawing by a dog named Tranda.
Mikki was a popular performer at the Moscow Circus and was trained by the pair in 1998 - when he was already 15 - first using a basic polaroid and then progressing to a regular analogue and antique camera.
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