Portraits of Extraordinary Beauty : Portraits of Moths

'Moth Man' Warren Krupsaw, takes photos small things most of us don't see, portraits of moths. 
His photos bring the beauty of these small creatures to us allowing us to see extraordinary detailed images of their features, wings, and antennae. No matter if you don't like insects, these photos allow you to see the beauty that is there in front of us but is missed everyday.
Krupshaw says, “They take a while to get used to you - when I first go out they don’t tend to ’play’ straight away but after a while they get more confident.

He has photographed 100 different species of this insect

Click here to see more of this beauty.

Zana Briski: Reverence: The Migrating Insect Museum

Zana Briski's Reverence for Insects
Opens in New York December 21, 2012

The world of insects can provoke fear or curiosity in humans. Zana Briski hopes it is the latter. She wants us to look at this project as a way of confronting our fears and those things that appear different from us.

Zana Briski is an award winning photographer and filmmaker who is best known as the director of Born into Brothels, the 2004 winner of the Academy Award for Documentary Feature. For her film, she photographed the harshness of life for those born into the brothels of India. In 2002, Zana founded Kids with Cameras and she published a book of the children’s photographs, Kids with Cameras. Her self-published book, is a collector’s edition of her own photographs, Brothel.

Briski's first love is animals and the natural world. So for this project she turns her camera to an entirely different subject, those who live in the entomological world, those of the praying mantis. Her new project is called Reverence, named for the state in which she photographs and for that she wants to communicate through her work. Zana collaborates with living insects in the wild, taking their portraits in photographs and film. She makes the statement, “when I have eye contact with an insect, I am in a state of awe and wonder. It is this want to transmit through my images." The project was mostly self-funded and she used Kickstarter that enabled her to raise funds to hire the architect to build the Reverence structure.

In this project she brings the exquisite world of the insect, music, and film together in a migratory museum. This temporary structure is inspired by the exquisite shape of praying mantis ootheca, or eggpod. This travelling museum will explore the human insect relationship in the world. It opens on December 21, 2012, in New York. This exhibit is housed in a 10,000 square foot structure that was designed by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban. After its opening in NY this project will travel to parks around the world. Briski will also work with a master printmaker to develop unique large-scale photographs on handmade Japanese papers.

Briski sees a world that society often fears, that which it does not understand. Briski's primary interest is to bring our relationship with nature and Earth to the forefront. She wants us to rethink how we as humans look at other creatures by bringing them face to face with us. For Briski, insects just don't exist as scientific specimens but they exist as attentive, knowing, and curious beings. She also goes on to say, the emphasis will not be on a scientific or an analytical perspective, but an emotional and spiritual one. Any funds raised from ticket sales, book, movie and print sales will go back to support environmental organizations and organizations which support native peoples, such as the San of the Kalahari."

Click below to watch her video.

A few of the many books at the Central Library about the world of insects

DVDs and Blu-Ray

Disc 3 includes Insects

Jennifer Angus and Her Insects

 Jennifer Angus  creates stunning art with nontraditional objects  Her objects of choice are some of the 30,000 insects she has collected that create a mix of entomology and intricate patterns. it's her love  pattern and textile led her to Thailand’s Golden Triangle—a region bordered by China, Laos and Myanmar, an area that contains some of he world's largest and most magnificently colored insects. It was here she  found the shawls of the Karen tribe lined with greenish iridescent jewel beetles. It was years later she put her passion for for textiles and the beauty of insects together.


Angus now has over 30,000 bugs in her inventory, which cost anywhere from 50 cents to $25 and gets used over and over again in different exhibitions. Her insects range in size from as long your hand to a small as the tip of a finger. She works with hardier bugs like grasshoppers with pinkish-purple wings, electric blue weevils, polka-dot weevils, leaf mimics, and thorny stick insects that can withstand the wear and tear of repeated pinning. Some of the weevils in her show have been in use since she first began. 


Angus pins her insects to the wall to create patterns in that look like Victorian wallpaper. Naturally electric blue, emerald green, pink, purple and red insects come together and bring excitement, exploration and scientific discovery. She also creates small-scale dollhouses covered in beeswax are home to anthropomorphized insects.

Read more about Jennifer Angus below and watch her video.

Meet Jennifer Angus, An Artist Whose Medium Is Insects

The Work of Jennifer Angus: A Closer Look
Jennifer Angus at CAFAM