THE WORLD’S MOST STUNNING MOTHS WILL SET YOUR HEART AFLUTTER

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• LAURA MALLONEE

EMMET GOWIN'S UNLIKELY love affair with moths started 20 years ago in Ecuador. Driving up a mountain road one night, his guide pulled over and set up a powerful light. Over the next three hours, Gowin watched in awe as hundreds of moths fluttered out of the forest toward the glow. "They’re all so exquisitely beautiful and unpredictable," he says.

He went on to photograph more than 1,000 moth species in Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, French Guiana and Panama for his new book, Mariposas Nocturnas: Moths of Central and South America, A Study in Beauty and Diversity. And in a stunning departure from most collections of entomology photography, nearly all of Gowin's moths are alive.

At 75 years old, Gowin has been photographing for more than 50 years, earning worldwide acclaim for intimate black-and-white images of his family living in Buck County, Pennsylvania. He never imagined he'd photograph bugs. But after that fateful Ecuador trip, Gowin found a new muse. “I felt an affinity for insects, for small things," he says. "And I wanted to understand more about tropical ecology.”"All the books have dead specimens pinned like little soldiers," Gowin says. "I have nothing against that ... But I liked the alertness that they exhibit in their feet and their wings, and the way their wings line up."

He traveled to Central and South America nearly 40 times to photograph moths in the wild, often joining expeditions with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama City. Gowan documented most in the middle of the night, kneeling before a UV light pointed at a white sheet or art print. They were tricky little subjects: Some flew away at the burst of the flash; others played dead. Gowin worked with film and digital cameras, but almost always made sure he had cotton balls stuff in his ears to prevent a curious critter from crawling in. "I met a researcher who had a moth or beetle lodged in his ear and had to hike out and have it removed in hospital," he says "It's a story researchers tell to beginners, with good reason."

Gowan then spent hundreds of hours poring through millions of specimens preserved in drawers at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the British Museum of Natural History, and other places. Entomologists occasionally gave him hints when he was stumped, and he found the rest perusing taxonomy websites. He laid the images out in grids, each containing 25 moths that were photographed around the same place and time.

Just because they're laid out by the dozen, though, doesn't mean they're not distinctive. “Moths are almost totally lacking in expression, but they do have body language of a kind,” Gowin says. “That's what I tried to preserve—how the wings align, the tension in the feet."

The photos are an obsessive, exhaustive homage to a creature Gowin finds beautiful, even if most people associate with chewed-up sweaters. He's aware of the problem. “I’m very keen on Persian carpets, and the moths like them too. It’s a constant little struggle,” Gowin says. “But in a balanced world, we find our place among these things.”

It’s the sort of wisdom you only gain at 2 o’clock in the morning, shining a bright light on a sheet, waiting for the bugs arrive.

Mariposas Nocturnas: Moths of Central and South America, A Study in Beauty and Diversity was published this year by Princeton University Press.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-worlds-most-stunning-moths-will-set-your-heart-aflutter/