Renowned for luminous portraiture made with legacy magazines and fashion houses, photographer Elizaveta Porodina pivots to the natural world’s tiniest protagonists. Commissioned by the climate-focused publication Atmos, she photographs beetles, butterflies, and mantises with a dreamlike ambiance and richly saturated color, bringing her portraitist’s eye to creatures often seen only in passing.
The commission centers on the concept of biomimicry and appears alongside a feature on Janine Benyus, who coined the term. Porodina’s images lean into atmosphere and tone as much as taxonomy, treating each insect as a sitter with presence and poise.
Atmos features and titles
Several works are identified by title and date in Atmos:
- The Magical Dream (featured in Atmos, April 2025)
- The Magical Dream (featured in Atmos, May 2025)
- The Return (featured in Atmos, May 2025)
- The Dreaming Body (featured in Atmos, May 2026)
- The Threshold Dreams (featured in Atmos, May 2026)
Together, these images reflect a cohesive approach: intensely colored fields and an ethereal sensibility that lift beetles, butterflies, and mantises into the realm of portraiture while keeping the focus on biomimicrythe design wisdom embedded in living systems that Benyus names and studies.
From magazine commission to monograph
The insect portraits shown here also appear in Porodinas new monograph Found Dreams, edited by Nadine Barth and released by Prestel. Within its pages, the work sits alongside more cinematic, fashion-focused imagery, extending a throughline from her established practice into a nature-driven register. The inclusion underscores how her saturated palettes and atmospheric staging translate seamlessly from human sitters to the delicate architectures of six-legged subjects.
Seen in print and in book form, Porodinas commission for Atmos offers a vivid, concentrated look at biomimicry and the insects that embody ita compact chapter in a broader career that continues to evolve across genres and scales.
