Nature scares me. It scares me simply because it still has too many mysteries, plants, bacteria, insects that I don’t know how they are made. What do the wings of a butterfly look like? What does a louse look like? What does a mold look like? I mean, what are they like really?
The only way to clarify some of the mysteries of nature is to look at it through a microscope, and at that point thanks to a lens a world of colors and shapes opens up, which in many cases only increase the fear for every tiny insect. The frightening charm of these micro-photographs is celebrated every year by the Nikon Small World Photomicrography, the photographic contest now in its 47th edition and organized by Nikon, which in recent days has unveiled the best photos of 2021.
The winner was the image of an oak leaf, created by superimposing two hundred photos then edited in post production, to bring out a surface, which looks like the ground of a lost planet millions of light years away from us, but more likely it is above your head, in the backyard.
“Nikon Small World was created to show the world how art and science come together under the microscope. This year’s first place winner could not be a better example of that blend,” said Eric Flem, Communications Manager, Nikon Instruments.

Here are some of the most beautiful photos of 2021.

I know perfectly the city where I was born and where I have always lived. I could go anywhere following the fastest route, they could even blindfold me, leave me in any corner of the streets and I would immediately recognize the place where I am. There is only one street where I have never passed, near the station, where a red and white sign announces the presence of a porn cinema.
In all the years I’ve passed through the intersection from which the sign is visible, I’ve always had a kind of dread in turning my gaze, not so much out of shame, more out of fear of seeing something I shouldn’t have. As if expecting to find a movie set along the sidewalk, or a poster that didn’t leave much room for imagination.

Tales from generations past speak of that cinema as a 18-year-old momentum (or earlier if you were lucky), in a season of conquering sexual freedom and opening up to a range of images that, judged by the thermometer of the time, could be defined as obscene. In this same climate, in a brief period from the late ’70s to the early ’80s, Marialba Russo‘s photographic work in Naples began.
The streets in those years began to fill with posters of hard films, and it is precisely the attractive charm of those works that lead Marialba Russo to photograph them secretly, from a distance, fleetingly or leaning out of the roof of her Due Cavalli.

The illustrations of those flans, collected in a beautiful book published by NERO Edition entitled Public Sex (2020), seen today are demure pornography, but at the time they were the sign of a split in a Catholic and patriarchal morality. Marialba Russo documents it through the collection of illustrations of adolescent and non-adolescent dreams, which a few years later are eliminated and in the years surpassed by an all you can eat pornography.
The collection is a work that is difficult to catalogue, if it were not for the fact that the pornographic genre in those years began to insinuate itself into other genres such as comedy, thanks to the stardom of actresses who also remained in the stories of those eighteen year olds mentioned a few lines above.

I look at Marialba Russo’s work and think back to the tic that leads me, at almost 30 years of age, to still dodge the sign for the cinema Roma, as if it were that soft-porn scene from the film that was on TV while I was on the couch with my parents. It is the documentary importance of the photographs that determines their value, in years in which much more imagination was needed to imagine the pleasure, it was enough not to look away from the street.

The photographs of Maud Chalard recount a generation in constant search of independence and escape. Class of ’89, this French artist easly represent a sweet universe, frozen in time, enjoying nature, art and poetry.

Her subjects, naked and sensual female bodies, live in bright and uncontaminated environments, travelling towards freedom and telling of a clear and sweetened world.

Illuminated by a warm morning light, the photographs of Maud Chalard activate all the senses: they are as clear as bell, salt like the sea, they smell of liquorice and chamomile, have the sound of the wind and are as soft as skin.

Her compositions, without adjustments or staging, are a sensible hymn to youth.

Follow her on official website and Instagram.

InstHunt is a selection of Instagram images that we have found on Instagram during the week and that we will propose to you every Friday.

Every day, on our Instagram profile, we ask you to share with us your most beautiful pictures and photographs.
For this InstHunt collection of this week we have selected your 10 best proposals: @rubencaeiropjoto, @valerycia, @fuocoescintille, @my_perfect_little_world, @_barbarac__, @jacopo_cerchi, @imagenationparis, @stefanodoffizi.ph, @cristian.perra, @mahirtasyurt.

Tag @collateral.photo to be selected and published on the next InstHunt.