Counter Works

I have a friend who lives and works in London. He is a very keen amateur entomologist and has been for many years. He takes the most exquisite macro photographs of the insects that he studies that reveal every detail. A few years ago he emailed me to say that he had starting putting these images up on a website. I visited the website and sure enough there were hundreds of beautiful images of ants and flies, beetles and so on. My friend had not finished building the site and so when I visited it these fantastically detailed images of, for example, dozens of different types of ant were simply labeled ‘ant’, ‘ant’, ‘ant’ etc and ‘fly’, ‘fly’, ‘fly’. Not because he doesn’t know the correct scientific name but he just hadn’t had time to label them. This experience immediately presented an opportunity to explore something that perhaps had been happening for some time in my work: the strangely compelling encounter between on the one hand a richly detailed visual account and on the other a willful neglect of taxonomy and nomenclature.