British photographer Adam Fuss has built an impressive oeuvre comprised of images created without the aid of a camera. By presenting details of the natural world—from rabbits to butterflies, flowers, babies, water drops and, as seen in the current lot, insects, Fuss’s body of work echoes the Victorians’ fascination with cataloguing the world around them. By doing so with photograms, instead of relying on the more acutely documentarian principles of photography, Fuss removes the direct correlation between his subjects and the real world, allowing them to hover in an intermediary enigmatic and haunting realm. Similarly, the cocoon in the current lot occupies an intermediate
phase, neither caterpillar nor butterfly, the perfect subject for Fuss’s subversive eye.