Whether the book itself becomes a raging success or not I have, of course, no way of knowing.
The kickstarter itself, however, has a statistical chance of success at this point of essentially zero. There's less than two days left, and it's sitting at the halfway mark. It would take some startling unusual turn of events to make this funding effort a success. I could go on about how it's poorly structured etc, but that would serve no purpose.
I have no idea what the reality of the situation is, but given the timing of the article relative to the timeline of the kickstarter, the article on the front page feels rather more like a oh crap, we're not going to get funded, what can we do? Hey, doesn't Josh have a web site thing? Hail Mary pass than, well, anything else.
The pictures themselves? Well, they look heavily overprocessed, which is not to say you couldn't get the effect in-camera, but ultimately, who cares? The question is raised, no amount of discussion of disclaimers will change that. Why don't they speak to me? I think it is because they have the look of pictures that the artist very much wants me to take seriously as Art, as a statement, as an expression, and yet when I spend time with them I can see in the end nothing in there except a bug enthusiast taking overdone photographs of bugs.
Whether or not the artist feels deeply here or not, I cannot judge. The point is, though, that the pictures do not communicate any depth of feeling to me, nor even a complete lack of feeling. Rather, they communicate an attempt to imitate deep feeling.