Microsculpture: Insect Portraits by Levon Biss

The result of a collaboration between the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and photographer Levon Biss, the Microsculpture series captures the microscopic forms of insects in striking large-format and high-resolution detail.

The aim of the project is to let people know and discover the extraordinary shape and structures of the insects collected in the museum. The Microsculpture exhibition can be visited at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History until 30 October 2016.

Intrigued by this project, Fine Dining Lovers posed Levon Biss some questions:

How did your collaboration with the Natural History Museum come about?
I had been shooting some macro insect work for a short while and approached the museum to access some of their extensive collection to further my project. I met with Scott Billings and presented my work on the laptop. I showed him the images and started zooming into the pictures and he was quite astonished, I don’t think he’d ever seen images with such detail before. From there they gave me open access to the collections and the assistance of Dr. James Hogan, the head of Life Collections.

What was your idea behind the Microsculpture project?
The idea was to push against the current trend of disposable images. We shoot millions of pictures but don’t give each one much thought, we just click the button as many times as we wish as there is no financial penalty in doing so. This is a different process to the days of shooting on film. I wanted to produce images that had a sense of worth to them, something that has a value that takes blood sweat and tears to create. The opposite of a digital mentality.