Forming the body of the ‘Microcosm-Macrocosm’ exhibition which opened this week at the Skoufa Gallery in Athens, Greece, Katerina Kaloudi’s latest photographic series takes visitors on a magical visual journey where cranes and parrots’ plumages mysteriously resemble stormy seas (Balearica Regulorum, 2013 & Amazona albifrons, 2013), seabird’s eggs miraculously depict a planetary system (Mikropoulia, 2014), and where wishes are made on sand dollars’ white stars (Sand Dollar, 2014). Whilst some of the images, before being photographed, may be visible to the naked eye, others needed magnification. The resulting reproduction of patterns takes into account birth, life and death all the way from the smallest scale (microcosm) to the largest scale (macrocosm) in the images that are captured and portrayed.  

And if you think that Kaloudi had to make her way to far flung lands such as Kenya to witness the structure of the feathers on a grey crowned crane or to the tundra of northern Québec to observe snowy owls nesting, in order to capture the purity of their heavily feathers through her lens, you’re mistaken. These birds, amongst the other animals featured in the series, were photographed just 20km outside the centre of Athens, at the Attica Zoological Park to be exact, a 20-hectare (49-acre) private zoo which hosts over 2,000 animals from 400 species. Whilst capturing their external beauty, the photographer also found a way to discover their internal counterpart by taking close-ups of fossils of rich natural wildlife sourced on Greek territory that she came across at the Goulandris Natural History Museum.