When first/last I featured this duo, I said that I wasn’t sure where it was taken – the obvious choice was the North Carolina Zoological Park in Asheboro, given how long ago it was taken and the negative film used. Except I didn’t recall ever seeing mandrills (Mandrillus sphinx) there. Since that time, I found several more examples in my negative pages, right smack between other subjects clearly from the NC Zoo, so apparently my memory sucks. I can’t pin down where in the zoo they were, which is curious, because I can tell you exactly how to get to most major species therein – or at least I could. It’s been a few years since I’ve been now and things might have changed.
Their previous appearance was for another weekly topic, then ‘Visibly Different,’ and I talked about how bad the quality of the shot was even when I liked the poses, and this image was used to illustrate the condition of the negative, though the scratches and dust are easy enough to remove. But some time in the years between the original capture and that post, I’d had an inspiration; a little fartistic altering, using the grain, produced this:
… which suddenly makes the grain a lot more at home, because we expect it from monochrome images, or at least find it more acceptable since much of the time, ‘monochrome’ means ‘old,’ and older films could be pretty grainy. And of course there was a bit of cleanup in there, isolating the subjects and removing distracting elements; the unfocused mandrill in the back now takes on a more symbolic nature, suggesting that it’s more imaginary than real.
And I couldn’t leave it at that, either.
I can confirm another detail now: this is a female (foreground) and male (background) mandrill, and has nothing to do with the looming specter of age or anything. The looming specter of males, now, that’s another thing, one I’m not qualified to comment on. I try not to loom, myself…