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Breathtaking Portraits That Meet Insects at Their Level
Photographer Thorben Danke hopes his intimate and artistic insect portraits can be a catalyst for caring
In 2018, I was an undergraduate researcher in an ecology lab when I found a paper detailing the 30 year decline of insects in a Puerto Rican forest. My attention was captured, and I wasn’t alone — over the next few months, academic papers consistently warned us that insects were disappearing. Popular headlines followed close behind.
The Financial Times said we were “sleepwalking towards the insectopocalypse,” National Geographic described insect populations “plummeting,” and writers for the United Nations environment program called the findings “a stark warning for humanity.”
All of these articles, and countless others, are referencing the same batch of papers, particularly the groundbreaking review study in Biological Conservation entitled, “Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers.” Among a list of probable drivers of insect decline, such as habitat loss due to intensive agriculture, the main finding that caught the media’s attention was that 40% of insect species are threatened with extinction in next few decades.
How do you convey this astonishing finding to the public in an attention-grabbing way? How do you explain to people that they should care about bees, ants, butterflies, crickets, beetles, flies, and even the cockroaches that scurry across the pavement at night?
Artist and photographer Thorben Danke had one idea: insect portraits.
I first came across Danke’s work on Instagram. With such beautiful colors and textures, it was hard not to stop scrolling to look at the intricacies of insect bodies that you could not have seen without his artful magnification.
Working with insect subjects was initially an accident — in July of 2016, Danke happened to have his camera out looking for a subject as a green bottle fly whizzed by in the garage. Click! He snapped a photo.
