Insect Art
For most people, insects are pests. We flick them off our arms. We spray them with pesticides. Levon Biss is a photographer. He wants us to see their beauty.
Biss takes close-up photographs of insects. Then he blows them up into larger-than-life images. Looking at one is like looking through a microscope. We see the insects in all their wonderful detail. Biss hopes this will lead viewers to appreciate these creatures. They are “marvels
marvel
MATTEO COLOMBO—GETTY IMAGES
something that causes wonder or amazement
(noun)
The Golden Gate Bridge is a marvel of engineering.
,” he says. “Hopefully, people will give them a little bit more respect.”
Levon Biss sets up a camera. He created this setup to photograph insects in all their tiny details.
LEVON BISS
Rare Bugs
The insects Biss has photographed are from the collection at the American Museum of Natural History. That is in New York. All of them are endangered or extinct
extinct
ANDREW HOLT—GETTY IMAGES
no longer existing
(adjective)
Dinosaurs have been extinct for about 65 million years.
.
Biss used cameras with microscope lenses. This allowed him to photograph a bug’s tiniest features. The process could take weeks. Biss sometimes took 10,000 pictures of an insect. Each picture would focus on a small section of the bug. Then he used a computer to put these pictures together into one giant image.
Big Picture
Biss hopes his photographs will get people talking. He wants us to think about the importance of protecting insects. “The beauty of these images is the hook,” he says. Beauty makes us look closely at the insects. That, Biss notes, makes us care. “Hopefully, we can shake things up and get people to pay attention,” he says.
Gallery visitors view one of Biss’s giant photographs. Some are as large as eight feet tall.
LEVON BISSFalling Numbers
Insects are important to our environment. They pollinate plants. They are food for other animals. But many species are disappearing because of human activity. Below are three photographed by Levon Biss. From top to bottom, we see a silk moth, a ladybug, and a blue calamintha bee.
Paired Text
More from Environment
Share a Link
- Click the icon above to copy the url link to your clipboard.
- Paste the link into the location in which you share assignments with students. Examples might include, but are not limited to Canvas, Schoology and Edmodo.
Google Classroom
- Click on the icon above to share the article with a class in your Google Classroom.
- Choose an action. Options might include creating an assignment or asking a question.
