A Bug’s Life

The Quiet Dignity of Deborah Carter’s Macro Photography

As humans, we buzz around. We flit from project to project and from place to place, eating a lot, making tremendous amounts of noise. We believe ourselves to be masters of the earth, and judging by our cities and roads and various contributions to science, we have evidence to support that thought.

However, in the grass along the roadside, within the walls of every building and in all garden plots, there lives a hidden kingdom of insects. Within this secret realm, wars play out and dramas unfold, but unless humans slow down to take notice, we will never see what we’ve been missing.

Deborah Carter — librarian by day and gardener for life — takes the time to show us.What she captures with the macro lens of her camera has challenged her preconceived notions about bugs.

On June 2 at Wake the Dead Coffeehouse, she invites everyone to explore the world she’s found.

“Scientists are changing their paradigm about the way insects have sentience,” Carter said about the insect inhabitants of her garden.

In fact, in a 2023 article of Scientific American titled “Do Insects Feel Joy and Pain?” ecologist and author Lars Chittka wrote, “The conventional wisdom about insects has been that they are automatons — unthinking, unfeeling creatures whose behavior is entirely hardwired. But in the 1990s, researchers began making startling discoveries about insect minds... Insects have surprisingly rich inner lives — a revelation that has wide-ranging ethical implications.”

Carter said, “I’ve seen these small creatures. I’ve seen them have fear. I’ve seen them protecting their little families. It’s not surprising to me to read that these tiny creatures have the ability to sense and fear and even play.”

Her photography illuminates the quiet dignity, humor and drama of her Photo by Deborah Carter

smaller-than-life subjects, creatures with whom she has become so familiar with that she can tell the differences between her various garden visitors.

“They’ve evolved for the same amount of time as humans have been evolving, so it’s not insane to imagine that they have these characteristics,” Carter said. “It’s not my imagination that they reveal themselves to me, and their courage.”

Carter’s Macro Show — her second annual — will showcase a vibrant cast of characters from her own veggie garden, as well as some from the Price Center and Discovery Center gardens.

“I’m not interested in their lives as a scientist, but I am as an artist and a gardener,” Carter said. “The photography is part of my gardening process. I’ll have my camera and I’ll see something — someone — that I recognize. Sometimes I’ll spend two hours per bug. I lose myself in it. It’s not a fast process.”

But the results are stunning. Each print represents hours of patient watching, plus an interesting creature, an element of action or a poetic environment. “A tiny ant eating in a field of yellow pollen. You really want to get their profile, to get their facial features. I’ve got a lot of spiders capturing a bug.”

Though this is Carter’s second annual photography show, she is not interested in pursuing this passion as a business enterprise. “I printed things to sell, but because gardening is so important to me, I’m not interested in converting this to a money- making scheme,” she said. “They are in metal frames or with foam backing so they’re sturdy. You can hang them with one thumbtack.”

In other words, the printed photos are ready to go home and serve as a reminder to slow down and enjoy the unseen world around us.

“There’s a lot of international disasters right now, and a lot of local and national scares,” Carter said. “Seeing those types of wars break out among insects gives me some perspective.”

Carter’s Macro Show will open with an artist’s reception at 7 p.m. at Wake the Dead Coffeehouse on June 2. The show will hang in the gallery until the end of the month.