Nikon Small World · 2022 Photomicrography Competition

The Image That Made the Whole Internet Reconsider the Ant Under Its Shoe

A Lithuanian photographer magnified an ant’s face five times, saw golden fangs and burning red eyes, and thought: beautiful. The rest of the internet thought something else entirely.

Eugenijus Kavaliauskas lives next to a forest in Lithuania. He photographs birds of prey, has done so for years, and had won awards for it. He is the kind of photographer who looks for details, shadows, and unseen corners. He has described his work as discovery. One afternoon he decided he was bored of watching ants move across the ground. So he caught one, placed it under a microscope, and looked.

What he saw did not frighten him at all.

The photograph he made that day shows the face of a Camponotus ant at five times magnification, illuminated by reflected light, filling the frame completely. The eyes glow a deep red. The mandibles curve forward like polished bronze hooks. Fine translucent hairs cover every surface. It looks, to most people who see it, like the kind of thing that appears in a nightmare or the opening scene of a horror film. One person on the internet said they would never sleep again. Another said they no longer felt bad about stepping on ants. A third pointed out that the image looked like Ant-Man, but directed by someone with entirely different intentions.

Kavaliauskas submitted the photograph to the 2022 Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition. It was recognized as an Image of Distinction, one of 89 photographs honored that year out of more than 1,300 entries. He received, for this work, a Nikon retail item worth $35. The image went on to become one of the most shared nature photographs of the year.

What You Are Actually Looking At

Before the horror sets in completely, a few things deserve honest clarification. The glowing red orbs that most people interpret as eyes are not, in fact, the ant’s eyes. They are the bases of the ant’s antennae, illuminated by the reflected light technique Kavaliauskas used. The actual eyes are smaller, positioned slightly further back on the head, and visible in the image once someone points this out. Several people did point this out in the original thread. One wrote: “When you realize its eyes are where the arrow is pointed, you can see it looks more like an actual ant. Not as creepy as it appears.” This is partially true. The ant does look somewhat less like a demon once you find its real eyes. The mandibles, however, remain exactly as alarming as they appear.

The species is Camponotus, commonly known as a carpenter ant, one of the largest and most widespread ant genera in the world. The individual in the photograph is probably a worker. It was, at actual size, a few millimeters long. Under five times magnification, it becomes something else entirely: a face with architecture, with texture, with the kind of detail that forces a reconsideration of what exactly has been living under the paving stones all this time.

“There are no horrors in nature. I’m always looking for details, shadows, and unseen corners. The main goal of photography is to be a discoverer.”

Eugenijus Kavaliauskas, speaking to Insider, October 2022

The Competition the Ant Photo Came From, and the Image That Actually Won

An honest account requires saying plainly: the ant photograph did not win the 2022 Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition. It received an Image of Distinction, a recognized category, but not the prize. The $3,000 first-place prize and the title of winner went to Grigorii Timin and Dr. Michel Milinkovitch of the University of Geneva, for a confocal image of the embryonic hand of a Madagascar giant day gecko, magnified 63 times. The gecko’s image shows its internal architecture through transparent skin: bones, tendons, nerves rendered in cyan, the entire developing limb visible from the inside as if it were made of colored glass. It is extraordinary in a completely different register from the ant. Where the ant makes you recoil, the gecko makes you stop breathing quietly.

The ant went more viral.

That gap, between what wins a photography competition and what the internet cannot stop sharing, says something worth sitting with. The gecko image is scientifically richer, compositionally more sophisticated, technically more demanding. Timin noted that the scan consisted of 300 tiles containing about 250 optical sections each, resulting in more than two days of acquisition and approximately 200 gigabytes of data. The ant took a retired bird photographer with a forest behind his house and a spare afternoon. Forty-eight years of Nikon’s prestigious photomicrography competition, and what captured the world’s imagination was an ant looking back at it.

Forty-Eight Years of Turning the Invisible Into the Unforgettable

The Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition was established in 1974, originally as a way to celebrate the optical microscope and the scientists and photographers who used it. It has, over five decades, produced a quietly extraordinary archive of images: breast tissue, mouse brain sections, zebrafish embryos, slime molds, beetle wings, blood vessel networks in the intestine of an adult mouse. The 2022 competition alone honored 89 photographers and scientists from around the world. The judges that year included a photo editor from the Washington Post, a cell biologist from the National Academy of Sciences, and a senior video journalist from the New York Times.

Most years, the winning image circulates in science media and photography circles and is largely unknown everywhere else. In 2022, an Image of Distinction, technically one tier below the recognized honorable mentions, became the image of the year for people who had never heard of the competition and never would again.

Why an Ant’s Face Stops the Scroll When a Gecko’s Skeleton Does Not

There is a specific category of image that reliably breaks through the noise of the internet: the thing you have seen a thousand times, revealed as something you have never actually seen at all. The ant is one of the most familiar creatures on earth. Every person alive has watched one. Most have stepped on several. Nobody has looked at one’s face.

Kavaliauskas understood this, at least intuitively. He said he had found it boring to photograph ants crawling on the ground. The ground-level view gives you a small, dark, purposeful creature, recognizable and ignorable. The microscope gives you something else: a face with eyes, with mouth parts, with hairs and structure and a kind of intentional-looking ferocity that the naked eye never offered. The familiar made alien. The small made enormous. The creature you dismissed made suddenly, uncomfortably present.

He also said, when he began working with microphotography, that he too had thought insects looked like monsters. He got used to it. Then he became fascinated. His quote, often overlooked in favor of the image itself, is the more interesting thing he contributed to this story: “I am fascinated by the Creator’s masterpieces and the opportunity to see God’s designs.”

He was not looking at a monster. He was looking at a design so intricate that no one had ever seen it properly before, and almost no one he showed it to could see past the first impression long enough to look again.

The familiar made alien. The small made enormous. The creature you dismissed made suddenly, uncomfortably present. That is what one afternoon with a microscope and a captured ant produced.

The $35 Prize and What It Tells You About Why He Does This

For his Image of Distinction, Eugenijus Kavaliauskas received a Nikon retail item worth $35. First prize that year was $3,000. The gap between those two numbers is large enough to be funny, and small enough to be irrelevant. Kavaliauskas had already won awards for his bird of prey photographs. He did not submit the ant to win money. He submitted it because he had found something strange and beautiful under a microscope and thought other people should see it too.

He was correct. Millions of people saw it. Most of them said it was horrifying. He would almost certainly disagree with every one of them, patiently and without defensiveness, and then go back into the forest to find something else nobody has properly looked at yet.

There are roughly twenty quadrillion ants on Earth. Each of them has a face that looks like this. You have been walking among them your entire life without knowing.

Sources: Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition, official 2022 results, nikonsmallworld.com; The Independent, “Extraordinary close up of ant’s face wins Nikon photo competition prize,” October 2022, via Yahoo News; UNILAD, “Terrifying close-up of ant’s face wins Nikon’s photo competition prize,” October 21, 2022; KSAT News, “Beautiful, haunting images from 2022 Nikon Photomicrography Competition show nature under the microscope,” October 19, 2022; DNA India, “Viral: Insane close up of ant’s face wins Nikon photo competition prize,” October 22, 2022; The Sports Grail, “Who Is Eugenijus Kavaliauskas Winner Of Nikon Photomicrography Competition,” October 2022; Capture Magazine Australia, “48th annual Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition winners revealed,” October 2022. Clarification: the photograph received an Image of Distinction, not first place. First place went to Grigorii Timin and Dr. Michel Milinkovitch of the University of Geneva.