One Picture

SPECIFICATIONS
Photographer: Jill Greenberg
Subject: Josh, a crested black macaque
Technical stuff: Mamiya RZ67 Pro II medium-format camera with 140mm lens and seven studio lights

Monkey Business
Meet Josh, who’s featured on the cover of celebrity photographer Jill Greenberg’s art book Monkey Portraits: Plus a Few Apes (Bulfinch Press), a portfolio of 76 elaborately lighted and digitally enhanced studio shots of trained animals. Josh is a crested black macaque (Macaca nigra), a species from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Most Americans had never heard the word macaca until last summer, when Senator George Allen of Virginia dredged up a racial slur from Africa’s colonial days—and his reelection campaign imploded.

The roughly 20 species of macaques, ranging from North Africa to Japan, include some of the world’s better-known monkeys, among them the photogenic Japanese macaque, or “snow monkey,” that hangs around volcanic hot springs in winter, covered in hoarfrost. Three species are flagged as endangered on the IUCN Red List: India’s lion-tailed macaque, with its silver-white mane; the little-known moor macaque from Indonesia; and Josh’s tribe. As few as 4,000 crested black macaques survive in nature preserves on the northeasternmost tip of Sulawesi. Habitat loss has taken its toll, but hunting is the most serious threat to their survival, and laws against poaching are rarely enforced. The good news is that there is still a booming population of crested macaques on a distant island where they were introduced in 1867.—Les Line