Macrophotographer Levon Biss’ new exhibit at Fernbank gets up close and personal with arthropods

On August 9, a special touring macrophotography exhibit by Levon Biss debuted at the Fernbank Museum of Natural History. Tucked deep in Fernbank’s Wildwoods Trail, Extinct and Endangered: Insects in Peril features large prints of the United Kingdom photographer’s hyper-detailed insect portraits. The bold 4-foot by 6-foot prints line a paved path meandering through the heart of the museum’s lush Piedmont forest. 

Standouts from the display of 19 portraits include an elderberry longhorn beetle in candy-striped yellows and purples, a sabertooth longhorn beetle showing off its back tattoos and a lesser wasp moth standing on pointe in chilling gothic silhouette. Each profile pops against a jet-black background. 

Although he might not be a household name, Biss is widely considered the most important and influential artist in the niche field of entomological macrophotography. Whether you know it or not, you’ve likely seen a Levon Biss bug before — the miniscule rendered magnificent through the artist’s painstaking documentation process. Biss’ images magnify tiny wonders of the natural world with razor-sharp clarity, revealing the often unobservable beauty of our arthropod neighbors. Scales on a moth’s wing appear soft enough to pet. Beetle elytra shine like priceless iridescent jewels. 

Not only are these striking minutiae often imperceptible to the human eye, they are usually impossible to capture with conventional photography due to the shallow depth of field of macro lenses. Biss achieves his trademark level of detail through a technique of his own invention — digitally collaging sections from thousands of individual photos to create a single image. By focusing a microscope lens on every section of an insect and adjusting the camera’s distance 10 microns at a time, Biss ensures that no part of his subject goes unobserved.

While this methodology might sound tedious and clinical, the resulting photographs are anything but. Biss’ portraits are unequivocally works of art, both in their reverence for the insects and the creative deliberation needed to convey such reverence. Biss chooses his subjects carefully — a necessity considering that it takes up to a month to depict a single bug — then illuminates them with an eye for drama, using light and shadow to accentuate the most compelling hues and surfaces of each creature. The resulting pictorial fireworks elevate these specimens out of the academic archives and into popular consciousness, splashing magazine covers and filling the pages of best-selling coffee table books along the way.

The work isn’t made for causal spectacle though. Biss venerates these animals to raise awareness about conservation, asking viewers drawn in by the beautiful enlargements to consider humanity’s relationship to these invertebrate species. Each giant print in Extinct and Endangered: Insects in Peril sports a caption that names the insect, lists its endangerment and protection status and explains its reciprocatory role in our natural environment. 

“There are two sides to this exhibition,” Biss said in a statement from Fernbank. “There’s the beauty and the celebration of these creatures. But there’s also a somberness when you marvel at these insects and start to understand that they are already extinct, or close to being gone, and the reason for that is us, primarily.”

Take for example the large photo of a blue calamintha bee, astounding for its variety of textures — a dimpled compound eye made of a thousand tiny windows; peacock-blue hammered metal skin; lush grizzly bear hair; translucent leather wings; and an abdomen encrusted in sparkling flakes of gold. Those flakes, the caption says, are pollen from mint plants native to the dwindling Florida ecosystem that this critically imperiled bee both supports and depends upon. Despite conservationists’ best efforts, this crucial pollinator has not been added to the federal endangered species list. 

The specificity of these descriptions, and the models themselves, come from close collaborations between Biss and partnering institutions. Microsculpture, the 2016 project that launched Biss into pop-science stardom, was developed with the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. For 2022’s Insects in Peril, the artist teamed up with The American Museum of Natural History, which hosts a permanent collection of some 30 million specimens and artifacts to draw from. Because archival offerings often have damage or imperfections, Biss sometimes combines different sections from multiple bugs of the same species to create an ideal composite insect. 

Knowing the extraordinary level of precision and focus that went into crafting such immaculate images, one might imagine that the ideal venue to take in all that detail would be an indoor gallery with controlled lighting and much larger archival prints. Fernbank’s outdoor exhibit doesn’t meet those viewing criteria, but it does offer a more laid-back experience that’s perfect for families with kids. 

With nature as the gallery, Biss’ photographs are literally crawling with living examples of the project’s subject matter. It’s a great opportunity to instill a respect for ecology from an early age. Mind the “Caterpillar Crossing” sign on your way out.

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Dustin Timbrook is a creative generalist working in art, film and music. He volunteers on the board of directors for Avondale Arts Alliance. Timbrook loves spending time with his family, playing with dogs and gardening.