Photographer Mikki will have prints of his work sell for more than $100,000 through Sotheby's. The reason why Mikki's photos are worth so much money is because the photographer is a chimpanzee.
Mikki learned his skills from Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, Russian conceptual artists who work under the name Komar and Melamid. The two found the chimp at the Moscow Circus and naturally saw his inner photographer.
They began by teaching Mikki how to use a Polaroid camera. Then the artists showed him analog photography. After becoming familiar with devices, Mikki was then trained on a old school format camera.
Experts say that prints of the 18 photographs snapped by the chimpanzee will go for around $100,000 at Sotheby's auction house in London on June 5. The collection has been named “Our Moscow Through the Eyes of Mikki.” Above you can get a preview of the process of teaching the chimp and the actual images he took.
Sotheby’s contemporary art curator, Suad Garayev, speaks highly of the series: "It’s a very important piece of work, and it is very exciting to be able to sell the pictures at auction. There’s been a lot of interest because it’s very unusual and it works on so many different levels. It’s an alternative view of Moscow as seen through alternative vision."
[via Petapixel]
