The photographer who chased ants all spring

For four months, photographer Fernando Maquieira went out in the mornings to observe the beginning of the day of an anthill that was in the crack of a wall. He followed the workers around the garden with his camera and a macro lens, capable of accurately portraying the faces of these insects. “Every day, like a routine, he followed them,” Maquieira remembers. «With spring they began to wake up and were slow. So I could get closer without them running away. Although they were groggy after hibernation, there was some difficulty because they were not always willing to pose, and the macro lens has very limited focus. If they moved a little, they went out of plane.

The ants managed to fascinate him. He began to write a story, inspired by authors such as Juan José Arreola and Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio. «I started a story and it came out only because I had many images in my head. The photos I had taken guided me. At first, I wanted to make a sentence for each image but it got out of hand.

This text opens the photobook ‘A tiny story’ (RM publishing house), where the protagonist Lea leaves the nest for the first time, with the mission of taking the birdseed from a canary named Pavarotti. In this adventure, very well narrated and designed for children, misplacements, dangers and alliances occur with other characters, insects too, that Maquieira had photographed between one ant and another.

Field work began in March and ended in June, when summer accelerated the animals. “There was no way, I approached and they ran away,” recalls Maquieira, also the author of other photography books, such as ‘Nocturna’, in which he immersed himself in the darkness of several important museums in the world at closing time, and ‘ Hallucinosis’, in which he gave another reading to a photographic archive affected by fungi after a flood.

The second part of the book (which comes out this month at a price of 19.90 euros) is dedicated to a selection of the 10,000 photographs that Maquieira took. The chosen ones are dispersed on the leaves to narrate Lea’s own odyssey with images. “More than a translation into another language, it is an interpretation of this tiny story,” she says.

What the author learned most from observing the ants, “always oblivious to the dramas that humans go through,” is that they have “a humanitarian part, even though nature does not know what justice is and they live in a “very disciplined and warlike society.” That spring there were several battles in his garden between rival anthills, but the most photogenic ones managed to survive, at least in the book.