Insects Don’t Get No Respect. Bring in the Glamour Shots!

• AUTHOR: MATT SIMON.MATT SIMON

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Caption:'Xylor,' Xylorhiza adusta, Southeast AsianPASCAL GOET

INSECTS HAVE THEMSELVES a PR problem. No group of animals is more reviled, feared, or distrusted, and that’s not fair. Insects may eat our crops and sting us (like that time a wasp with a particularly nasty venom made a grown man crawl into a ditch and “bawl his eyes out”), but that’s just kind of their thing.

Really, they’ve got far more personality than just full-tilt derangement. And few photographers bring out their personalities like Pascal Goet, a veteran science photojournalist based in Méré, France. For 20 years, he’s been getting up real close to capture the most beautiful species in the insect kingdom, revealing intricacies that escape the naked eye. “The inspiration behind this is to disconnect man’s repulsion for the insects and make them accept and at least, aesthetically, love them,” Goet says.

His portraits of beetles are particularly striking. The longhorn beetle Xylorhiza adusta (slide one above) has the contemplative look of a pissed off monk, while the mugshot of Scarabaeus sacer (slide nine) showcases the telltale head of a beetle that shovels turds for a living.

And Goet’s shield bugs—which superficially resemble beetles yet make up a different group—naturally focus on those famous shields. Behold Catacanthus nigripes from Indonesia (slide four), the living luchador mask of the animal kingdom.

Goet’s tight zooms on the insects’ heads and backs are calculated. “When I show insects with legs and hairs and things like that, people are scared,” he says. “But when I show something that looks like an African mask, they see that very differently because they’re captured by the colors.”

But why bugs? They are, after all, difficult to photograph on account of their small stature. Well, sure, animals like birds can also wow you with their colors, Goet says. “But in the insects you have strange shapes, you have behavior that’s very strange, you have extraordinary colors. And this is very, very special.”

As for those strange behaviors. Among insects, there’s no beating the staggering diversity of beetles. They make up one in four species—like, all animal species, not just insects. They’re wood-borers, swimmers, and huge-jawed scrappers like Macrodontia cervicornis (slide 12).

Living in France, though, Goet isn’t exactly beset by the world’s greatest biodiversity of insects—he’d have to head to the tropics for that. So he borrows specimens from natural history museums and even breeds his own specimens.

He shoots them in lightboxes with macro lenses, of course, on a Canon EOS. And believe it or not, he doesn’t muck with the colors in Photoshop, opting instead for that au naturellook. “I only take parts off in Photoshop,” Goet says. “Legs and things like that.”

In Photoshop, I’ll emphasize. Not in real life. In Photoshop.

http://www.wired.com/2016/04/pascal-goet-never-before-have-bugs-looked-so-much-like-wrestling-masks/#slide-1