This limited-edition print from the Solid Air series measures 17" x 22" and is printed with archival digital inkjet on Epson Fine Art Velvet paper.

Joe Nocera of The New York Times writes:

"I love these photographs. So full of grace and beauty, so brimming with quiet technique. It is hard to believe at first, that these photographs capture the simple and seemingly ordinary act of moths in flight, but Paul Mutimear has found something rich and complex in that simplicity and something extraordinary in the ordinary. He has taken a thing we barely notice and turned it into art."

These photographs were taken in the summer of 2009 in the Northern Catskills, New York State.They were inspired by a lifelong interest in understanding how things work. Having noticed a fleeting, flickering trail from the corner of my eye one night as moths flew around a floodlight, I began to explore whether it was my imagination or perhaps a trick of the light.

My first guess was that the strobe-like effect was caused by the 60 cycles per second of the A.C. powering the light, so I began photographing them to figure it out. I soon realized that the effect was, in fact, simply produced by light on the rhythmic wing beats of the insects leaving a brief after-image on my retina. Seen frozen in light through photography, the intricacy of flight can be clearly observed in the recorded shapes. More surprising, and revelatory to me, is the beauty and symmetry of the forms carved into the air by the wings.

These sculptural forms are created, not by exotic creatures nor by grand design, but by common insects, particularly gypsy moths and mosquitoes which are generally regarded as pests. In a society that considers its own superiority over other life forms to be God-given, it is enlightening to realize that neither a creature’s scale nor its standing in our esteem has any influence on the magnificence of evolutionary development illustrated here.