Nanocosmos: Journeys in Electron Space is an otherworldly collection of images from a mysterious realm of the extremely small scale. With help from powerful scanning electron microscope (SEM) technologies that he started working with at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), artist Michael Benson went on a years-long adventure to see creatures and organisms he wouldn’t otherwise be able to see—and to posit portraits of them as examples of a new kind of photography in an expanded field.
Nanocosmos, handsomely published by Abrams Books, follows other volumes by Benson including Otherworlds: Visions of Our Solar System and Planetfall: New Solar System Visions, for which he created images of outer space by compositing together raw images into highly refined photographs, and Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time, a compendium of illustrations, maps, and other renderings of intergalactic realms from more than 1,000 years of human culture. (He also wrote a history of the movie 2001 titled Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece.)
To create the images in Nanocosmos, Benson worked with SEM scans he made over six years at the Canadian Museum of Nature and conjured visions of single-cell organisms and other matter that cannot be seen by the naked eye.
“I’m interested in the frontier, which I define as the border between what we know or think we know and what we don’t know,” Benson said. “That zone is usually accessed only by scientists, and I find it fascinating as a place to go.”
See some highlights from the pages of Nanocosmos with commentary by Benson below.
