When a cicada landed on Diana Zlatanovski when she was a child, it was hardly a magical moment. But when she photographed a collection of cicadas housed at the Museum of Comparative Zoology for her new book of images, “Typology: Collections at the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture,” “I began to appreciate how beautiful they really are, with the bold graphic patterning on their bodies and the delicate lines of their translucent wings,” she said.
“I’ve also gained an understanding of how those elements help them to blend into the trees and survive. Now I do find the loud hum of cicadas on a summer evening a bit magical.”
The cicada specimens at the MCZ are some of many that Zlatanovski — a collection steward at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology — studied and photographed for the book.