Images reveal the astonishing complexity of the microscopic world

A butterfly net, tweezers and a drawstring bag filled with small plastic vials: it's an unusual set of tools for a photographer, but not for Michael Benson. For more than six years he collected samples for his new book. Nanocosmos: Travels in Electronic Spacea collection of images depicting the microscopic world in great detail.

“I'm fascinated by the boundary between what we know and what we don't know—an area usually associated with science,” he says. “But I go there as an artist, not as a scientist.”

However, this did not stop Benson from using equipment often intended for physicists and biologists. He created every image in Nanocosmos using powerful scanning electron microscopes (SEM), a technology that emits a focused beam of electrons to map surface contours in amazing detail. The resulting images capture Benson's submillimeter objects with such clarity that they appear to be from an alien planet.

Consider this Asilidae robber fly (main image above) next to a flowering plant from Alberta, Canada. Both together are only slightly wider than 1 centimeter across. But thanks to SEM technology, we can see almost every hair on a fly's body, every claw on its foot, and even some of the thousands of individual receptors that make up its bulging eyes.

Benson first used SEM in 2013 while working at the MIT Media Lab. “Trying to master SEM has a steep learning curve, and it took me several years to get there,” he says. For example, all items must be coated with a “molecule-thin layer of platinum so they don't get charged by the device's electron beam,” he says, before being thoroughly dried to preserve surface detail.

Above is Benson's image of the wing of an eastern pond dragonfly (Simple erythema)when looking from the wing tip down. It is native to the eastern two-thirds of the United States, southern Ontario and Quebec, Canada. Quebec is where this specimen was once home. Its wing is about 3 millimeters wide.

Below is a photo of a single-celled marine organism taken by Benson (Hexalonche philosophical) from the equatorial Pacific Ocean, which is 0.2 millimeters long from tip to tip.

Another marine organism Ornithocercus splendidus (shown below), belongs to a species of plankton that lives in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Florida. Its width is only about 0.1 millimeters.

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