Zoo exhibition
Portraits of a MicroWilderness: Michigan’s Backyard Invertebrates
April 6 - October 15, 2006 - Detroit Zoo
“Spectacular” - The Detroit News
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Delightful denizens by Nick Sousanis
Metro Times [ May 17, 2006 ]
Photographer Rick Lieder is out to change the typically repulsive reaction to insects and other backyard invertebrates. In 31 photographs, currently on display at the Detroit Zoo, Lieder sheds light on behavior at the microscopic scale through strikingly beautiful portraits of tiny creatures.
The bug project began in 2002 as a self-imposed challenge to create something of beauty with just a camera and a Tamron 90 mm macro among other lenses - no tripod, no flash and no digital manipulation. As a result, not only has he created fine art photographs, he’s captured the personality of his subjects. It goes without saying that working at such a tiny scale with subjects who rarely hold their poses increases the difficulty. Lieder attributes his success to patience. Poised in the grass, waiting for hours for the right moment, Lieder became attuned to these critters, and his fascination with their behavioral patterns fueled a much larger project than originally anticipated. Now, he not only shoots in his Berkley backyard, but in similar settings in New York City and Leamington, Ontario.
Originally trained as a scientist, Lieder, left that world around 1980 to study photography and painting. His background in science explains his interest in investigating and documenting life at this scale in great accuracy and detail, while his understanding of light and composition lends each picture unique artistic merit. With an exceedingly narrow band of sharp focus on the subject, and a steady hand, the background dissolves into a blurred dreamscape, an atmospheric field of green, yellow and orange.
With his lush palette, it’s conceivable that Lieder’s compositions might be mistaken for paintings. To describe just a few: A leafhopper climbs diagonally along a shaft of green grass edged in a sliver of brilliant blue - it’s a sharp contrast to the softer greens infusing the rest of the image. This isn’t Photoshop; it’s Lieder’s use of natural light, in this case, a reflection of the sky. In another image, an amber-hued wasp with transparent wings is perfectly silhouetted against a brilliant sunny spotlight. Lieder also photographs a butterfly head-on, its wings obscured, with the focus instead on its spindly legs and curving, elongated proboscis (mouth). This intensely interplays with the backdrop, featuring pink vertical shafts of stamens emanating from a flower.
With each portrait, Lieder presents a short narrative. One portrait, he notes, is “100 percent made in Detroit,” shot at the Dally in the Alley. He offers insight into his subjects’ daily struggles: “Witness an ant stretching to bridge the impossibly wide gulf between two plant stalks.” His comments articulate his search for beauty, even in something as seemingly ordinary as his backyard. In the text accompanying a photo of a glass-like spider, taken in New York City’s Central Park, Lieder writes: “Any place is Eden if you take the time to look.” Another caption describes his yard as a “green cathedral of grass.”
In revealing this beauty, Lieder wants us to see these small creatures as “more than just ‘bugs’ or ‘pests.’” It’s his objective to “highlight their remarkable biodiversity, making a difference to efforts in conservation, and the public appreciation of all wildlife.” This photo collection is a stunning visual achievement and an eye-opener. Check out the show, or his Web site, bugdreams.com, and then explore your microwilderness.
Nick Sousanis is the arts editor at thedetroiter.com.
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Detroit News review
Detroit News Columnist Neal Rubin [ Sunday, April 2, 2006 ]
Rick Lieder was hard at work last summer at a park in Rhode Island when a passer-by interrupted him. “Are you OK?” the man asked. “Oh, sorry. I thought you were dead.”
Lieder was sprawled in the grass, face-down and stock-still, wearing unseasonably bulky clothes and concentrating furiously on a spot maybe 8 inches in front of his nose. Heavens no, he explained, much to the man’s relief. He was merely taking a picture of a bug.
As far as Lieder knows, he is one of America’s foremost bug photographers. Also as far as he knows, he is the only bug photographer in the business who doesn’t use long lenses, tripods or artificial light.
Visitors who see his work for the next five months at the Detroit Zoo will recognize that his process leads to fuller backgrounds, more vivid colors and more arresting artworks. That’s the good part.
It also leads to bites. Lots of bites. Like last year in Manchester, south of Chelsea, when something very small and very nasty attacked him and he wound up with red welts that didn’t go away for four months.
“I’ve often gotten poison ivy or poison oak,” he says. “I’m also getting horribly dirty.” Sweaty, too; no matter how hot the day, he has to seal his pants at the cuff, bundle fabric around his neck and button his sleeves.
Ungrateful insects infiltrate anyway. Perhaps that’s why there’s so little competition in the realm of hand-held, natural-light bug-snappers. Fortunately, the results are worth it. The photos he’ll show in the zoo’s Wildlife Interpretive Gallery are spectacular.
They’ll hang from Thursday through Sept. 13. Samples also can be admired at his Web site, BugDreams.com, where they are conveniently offered for sale. They might seem expensive at $150 on up, but considering what he goes through to get them, why nit-pick?
“I’m really patient,” says Lieder. (As you might imagine, so is his wife, novelist Kathe Koja.) Sometimes he’ll stalk an insect; more often, he’ll hunker down and see what develops. With insects moving rapidly, no flash to freeze them in the frame and no anchor for his camera, “I might take a few hundred pictures and only get one good one.”
Whereas many of your commonplace bug photos have black backgrounds, his show the shades and textures of the insects’ exotic natural environments, such as his backyard in Berkley. That’s where he started grubbing among them a few years ago, just out of curiosity.
“I never really expected to show these to people,” he says. He makes a living as an artist, not a photographer, primarily doing book covers. When he looked at his photos, though, he saw swirls of purple framing a mantis, white droplets in clusters behind an ant, an eruption of pink petals above a spider.
“We’ve got a world-class zoo,” he thought. “Maybe I should go talk to them.”
The zoo’s fine arts curator was enraptured, and Lieder’s tiny creatures will be celebrated with a title longer than most of his subjects laid end to end — “Portraits of a MicroWilderness: Michigan’s Backyard Invertebrates”.
He hopes the exhibit will help people appreciate the beauty and diversity of insects, and perhaps lead to fewer insects getting cavalierly squashed. He also notes that if all the insects in the world expired, so would all the people.
Then if someone surprised him in a park and asked if he were dead, he would have to say yes.
