Behind Glass

The phrase “a photo is worth a thousand words” is one of the most accurate and powerful statements ever made.  It’s true that what the human eye can see and what our mind can deduce in a single second from a simple image is fascinating.  Anne Berry’s photos of monkeys behind glass are very simple and plain, yet they evoke a lot of emotion just at the sight of them.  It is unclear whether these are caged monkeys or wild ones just put in restrained areas, yet the monkeys all give off the same feeling.  When looking into the monkeys’ eye it pulls on the sympathy we have for these animals that are so like us.   It’s just a pane of glass that separates us, and yet the lives we now lead are completely different.  While going to the zoo and observing the “wild” animals can be fun, afterwards we are free to return home and resume our everyday lives.  Yet for the monkeys and other animals they are stuck in that cage for the rest of their life just because they were born in captivity.  They don’t get to return home, because we raised them to be dependent on human beings and would now die without our support.  They are also confined to their own cages or small patches of land where they endlessly roam in small circles and have to call their home.  It is in our nature to take pity on the monkeys that we did this to.  We took them our of their original lands and transported them over the world to make a profit. Just another instance of our innovative yet greedy and destructive minds have found a way to disrupt more nature.  Now we ask the question why we feel the need to disrupt nature or isolate ourselves from it.  We once started our as cave men and learned to build civilizations and new technologies, and now that we see ourselves as supreme beings we find it ok to dictate all other aspects of the world.  Humans are descendants of monkeys and now we find ourselves looking at these creatures from behind a glass wall.  Our evolutionary ancestors are now just creatures of nature that we put in cages to look at, yet they are alive too and look right back at us.  Anne Berry shows through these photos that although humans are a part of this world, we find ways to separate ourselves from the nature and creatures we came from.