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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