Giles Sparrow

Evolution equipped the human eye for long-distance work, to develop the survival skills we needed in a landscape filled with predators. Bring an object close to the eye, on the other hand, and it dissolves into a meaningless blur. Ever since the first artificial lens was ground, we have worked to compensate for our limitations, craving to see and understand small things in ever finer detail.

Over the past 400 years or so, our visual technologies have become increasingly sophisticated: from simple magnifying glass to microscope to electron microscope, and now to "scanning probe microscopes" that reveal the minutest intricacies of life. This collection of hundreds of images immerses us in the unexpected beauties of lichen, algae, pollen grains, spider webs, seal fur, hummingbird feathers -- and here, the petals of an orchid, magnified almost 1,200 times.