Illusion of Orderly Progress

From one of America's most distinguished and quirkily gifted photographers, a wildly original book of images that chronicles--and critiques--the curiously familiar social life of bugs.

        Barbara Norfleet loves bugs for both their beauty and their strangeness, and the fact that they've been on earth so much longer than the human race that they make us look like new kids on the block.  In this remarkable collection, she sets out to explore her own vision of bug society--its feelings, its relationships and rituals, its neuroses and malaises at the end of what is, after all,  just one more millennium in bug history. From a grasshopper poised triumphantly atop a rock and a spindly-armed pair of Harlequin beetles dancing, to a group of twittering bugs gathered to watch the sun set, a beetle beauty pageant, and a bug hanging, Norfleet captures with extraordinary humor and perception an amazing reflection of our own experience and feelings. Most wonderful of all is what we are led to discover--that bugs are us.

Barbara Norfleet is the founder, director, and curator of The Photography Collection at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard. Her work is part of the permanent collections of virtually every major museum in America.