Selfie by Naruto, an Indonesian Crested Macaque

Photographers have a term called "camera face" to describe the pasted-on grin that most of us adopt whenever a camera is pointed in our direction. The phenomenon could conceivably apply to other primates, as witness a "selfie” taken by a grinning six-year-old crested macaque named Naruto, who used a camera deliberately left unattended by a British wildlife photographer in an Indonesian forest preserve. The selfie led to a protracted legal battle between the photographer and his U.S. book publisher on one side and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), which claimed the image belonged to the monkey under U.S. copyright law.  

PETA had latched onto the case to advance its contention that animals have rights that have previously been reserved exclusively for humans.  The suit hinged on whether copyright ownership could be conferred on animals as well as people.  This would determine whether PETA, acting on Naruto’s behalf, would have standing in the case.  Had the monkey been human, there was no question he would own the copyright to the picture he took.  He even appeared to smile for the camera.  But would Naruto actually recognize himself if he were shown the image?  

One detail seems especially pertinent in answering this question.  The photographer, David Slater, had set the camera up with a tripod and cable release as monkeys gathered around.  He reported that they seemed fascinated by their own reflections in the camera’s wide-angle lens.  But did they recognize themselves in the lens, or did they think there was another monkey grinning back at them inside the camera?  

Mirror self-recognition is considered a key indicator in the evolutionary development of self-awareness.  Apart from humans, only a handful of other species are known to have this capability, and Naruto’s macaque cousins had never shown any aptitude for self-recognition – at least not until recently.  But now researchers are reporting that macaques can be trained to recognize themselves in a mirror.  Could it be that Naruto somehow knew he was taking a selfie?  Probably not. 

In contrast, human beings by the age of two know exactly who is making faces at them in the mirror and are even taking selfies with their parents’ cell phones.  (I can confirm that my granddaughter was mugging for the camera before she graduated from diapers to training pants.)  French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan first identified the “mirror stage” of child development, when toddlers fall in love with their reflections in a mirror, signaling the emergence of self-awareness.  This is the point at which the self becomes both the subject and object of one’s awareness – a condition that the 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer regarded as “the most monstrous contradiction ever thought of.”

Every self-respecting two-year-old is a raging narcissist, although it is worth noting that the original Narcissus of Greek mythology had been placed under an enchantment that prevented him from realizing the youth gazing back at him in a pool of water was actually himself. “How I wish I could separate myself from my body,” he sighed upon seeing his own reflection in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  In a sense, that is exactly what we do when we become self-aware.  We turn ourselves inside out, simultaneously seeing the world from the inside and yet viewing ourselves as if from the outside. It is probably not something that Naruto would ever be capable of doing.  But just observe what happens the next time someone points a camera in your direction.   
 

Ed. Note: A federal appeals court ultimately tossed out PETA's case on Naruto's behalf, ruling that monkeys had no right to copyright protection.

Penicillium Chrysogenum Fungus Culture
 

On a recent anniversary of Scottish bacteriologist Sir Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin in 1928, I got curious about the strange blue-green mold that he first noticed killing staph bacteria growing in a Petri dish in his London lab.  What did penicillin mold actually look like?  Mold, to me, was that fuzzy green gunk that sometimes appears on a cantaloupe slice that has been left too long in the back of your refrigerator.  The pictures of penicillin mold I found online were a revelation.  Here was this deeply furrowed blue-green mandala flecked with gold and fringed with white, the furrows radiating from its center.  The photograph identified the mold by its scientific name: a Penicillium chrysogenum fungus culture.  It was undeniably beautiful.

The story of Fleming’s discovery began when he returned from a two-week summer vacation back home in Scotland and found that the Petri dish in which he had been cultivating staph bacteria had become contaminated by mold.  Rather than simply sterilizing the Petri dish for reuse, he decided to investigate why the mold appeared to have killed the bacteria.  Fleming, as it happens, had been looking for an antibiotic agent that was not also harmful to the human body.  He found it in the substance he initially called “mold juice,” then "penicillin" after the name of the mold itself.

The 19th-century biologist Louis Pasteur, who himself did pioneering work on the link between bacteria and disease, famously said, “Chance favors only the prepared mind.”  Fleming was modest about his contribution to what became the most consequential medical breakthrough in the 20th century. “Nature makes penicillin,” he said, “I just found it.”  Not being a trained chemist, Fleming did not succeed in isolating and purifying the antibiotic agent in penicillin mold.  He turned that task over to researchers at Oxford, who shared with him the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1945.  Still others figured out how to mass-produce the antibiotic using mold that was found growing on cantaloupe, as it turns out.         

Reflecting on his achievement, Fleming said, “One sometimes finds what one is not looking for.”  The key, of course, is to have the presence of mind to recognize what one has found, which means one has to be paying close attention.  In Fleming’s case, it meant rescuing a “contaminated” Petri dish from a pile of dirty Petri dishes that were set to be washed out with Lysol.  What exactly did Fleming do to earn his Nobel Prize?  Nothing much, by his own estimation.  And yet his simple act of observation, which he called wider attention to in a scientific paper, has saved millions of lives in the decades since.

As a landscape photographer, I realize much of what I do is finding what I am not looking for.  When I set out with my camera and tripod, I am rarely headed for some scenic overlook.  My hunting ground is often within walking distance of my house, some nook or cranny I may have passed a thousand times without giving it a thought.  And yet, when seen from a certain angle or in a certain light, mere backdrop becomes dramatic foreground.  “Life is a series of surprises, and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay “Experience.”  The trick is to keep your eyes peeled, not just for what you have in your sights at the outset but for what you might discover along the way.  To focus so exclusively on your intended subject that you see nothing else is actually a form of visual impairment.  You need to take a wide-angle view.   At the same time you cannot ignore what lies closest at hand, indoors as well as out: the junk in your garage and basement, your bathroom, your kitchen, the contents of your refrigerator.  I would like to think, if I ever found a beautiful moldy cantaloupe in the back of my refrigerator, that I would have the presence of mind to photograph it before it got thrown out.

"Cotton Hollow" by Eric Rennie

My photograph, "Cotton Hollow," is one of 50 images appearing in a national juried competition entitled "Empty Spaces : Abandoned Places" at the Praxis Gallery in Minneapolis, MN.  The juror is photographer Lance Keimig.  The exhibit runs from January 24, 2020 to February 18, 2020.  The photograph was taken at the 200-year-old ruins of a cotton mill along Roaring Brook in Glastonbury, CT.  The image was previously exhibited at the Darkroom Gallery in Essex Junction, VT and the Southeast Center for Photography in Greenville, SC.