Photographing Monkeys

The starting point of this essay is the famous case of the selfie taken by a crested black macaque who managed to get hold of the camera of a British nature photographer in the forests of Indonesia in 2011. The monkey’s smiling self-portraits appeared in media around the world and sparked a legal and public debate over issues of copyright, royalties, and fair use of images. Toister argues that the very existence of a debate is evidence of the collapse of the traditional dichotomous division between the natural and the animalistic and between the human and the technological, and invites a reexamination of the photograph as a unique act that combines all these aspects. To this end, he draws on the unique philosophy of Vilém Flusser, especially the conceptual foundation of “image,” “information,” “apparatus,” and “software” which he developed in his discussion of photography. Using that philosophical approach Toister examines the ways in which the automation of photography changed the perceptions of our intention, memory, and actions, to the extent that in some ways we are all “simian photographers.”