[Cookie the Chimpanzee with boy on a tricycle, Bronx Zoo, New York]

Cookie, a young chimpanzee in the Bronx Zoo, was a popular photographic subject in the early 1940s. After receiving a box camera loaded with film, Cookie became a celebrated amateur photographer in her own right, whose images were reproduced in various magazines and journals. Vishniac’s fascination with and appreciation for animals, and his passion for photographing them, can be seen in hundreds of unprinted negatives from early 1920s Europe to late 1960s America. The Vishniac family even had a pet monkey, Jackie, in their Berlin apartment.