British artist Levon Biss is widely regarded as one of the leading macro photographers of his generation. He describes his artworks primarily as educational tools, encouraging the appreciation of the natural world. Levon’s high magnification photographs are used in school curriculums around the globe and his exhibitions present microscopic worlds to public audiences, enabling them to appreciate hidden details normally invisible to the human eye.
Levon’s exhibits internationally and his prints are housed in numerous museum and private collections. He has published five books and his photographs have featured in titles such as National Geographic, TIME and The New York Times. He continues to work in close collaboration with the leading museums around the world to bring their hidden collections to a global audience.
In 2016 Levon released the multi-award-winning project Microsculpture, a unique three-year photographic study of insects in unparalleled magnification that took the genre of macro photography to an entirely new level. Levon adapted traditional techniques to create a photographic process that revealed the minute details of insects in a resolution and scale never seen before.
His photography is displayed in large-scale formats, with subject matter only a few millimetres long presented as 3-metre-high prints. Each artwork takes four weeks to create, produced from over 10,000 individual photographs using microscope lenses on a bespoke photo rig. Described as a “beautiful marriage between art and science”, the Microsculpture exhibition has travelled through Europe, the Middle East, South America and the USA, with solo shows in 25 countries.
In 2020 Levon turned his attention to botany with the The Hidden Beauty of Seeds & Fruits. Levon studied the carpology collection of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and after inspecting thousands of specimens he photographed 100 for the project. The final images display seeds and fruits from around the world in exquisite detail, enabling the viewer to appreciate their intricate adaptations and learn about the techniques used by plants in their bid to reproduce. As with all Levon’s projects, the exhibition is accompanied by educational packs to enable schools to utilise the show as part of science and art curriculums.
Levon’s most recent project is Extinct & Endangered: Insects in Peril was released in 2022. The project is a collaboration with the American Museum of Natural History in New York and aims to highlight the current crisis of insect decline and biodiversity loss. The exhibition presents 40 large format prints of insect specimens from the museum’s collections that are either extinct or under severe threat, primarily due to human activity. The exhibition has been on display in New York for one year and has been visited by over three million people. Extinct & Endangered will begin a European tour in the summer of 2023.
