PAUL BROOKE

My art is a confluence of disciplines: book design, photography, poetry and science. It serves to save species and wild nature by reaching across cultures and philosophical divides. By using archetypal, cultural and ecocritical theories, my writing helps me to integrate confessional elements. Photography is essential because it serves as a record of my observations of the natural world to transmit beauty and to spotlight environmental destruction. Science enables me to deep dive into ecosystems to understand the way they function, into species like jaguars or pumas to understand the intricacies of their adaptations and behaviors. It allows me to collaborate with scientists and researchers from all over the world. All of these disciplines merge and spin. Beauty matters. Nature restores. Art keeps me trying to find meaning amidst chaos. In the end, there is jouissance, a pure aesthetic, a pure joy that keeps me inventing new ways to interpret the world.

In terms of my techniques for photography, the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) is a balance in magnification, focus and vacuum. In order for the honeybee leg image to look right, I picked a cool structure and focused on the pollen grains.

The SEM is complicated. First, I must mount the specimen with tape. Second, it must loaded into the machine. Three, a vacuum must be created. That means drawing the air down to 1 Pascal (for the honeybee) and magnifying 290 times. The electrons actually interact with the sample and light certain parts more than others. So it's trial and error to achieve the right composition.

All of these samples were collected (surprisingly) in my garage as I found a tiny honeybee next to my stepson's car and a year later the beetle.

Paul Brooke is a multidisciplinary artist who combines science, photography, poetry and book design. His work has appeared in The North American Review, The Antioch Review, and Scientific American (this summer). He is the author of six books including Jaguars of the Northern Pantanal: Panthera onca at the Meeting of the Waters and Sirens and Seriemas: Photographs and Poems of the Amazon and Pantanal. Currently, he is finishing a poetic narrative based on pumas in Chile called Pantagruelian.