Recently, I led a conversation on contemporary photography at the Amarillo Museum of Art, I divided the talk into trends and then juxtaposed two images for each topic. This post is about one of the pairings, and I am adding a music video that takes a similar device and turns it in a new direction.
The image above is by Richard Avedon from his series In the American West. This was a documentary project funded by the Amon Carter Museum. It was juxtaposed with the image below by Maggie Taylor, entitled, "Girl in a Bee Dress." The purpose of this juxtaposition was to talk about real/surreal, documentary/digital, and the age old notion of photographic truth. I like the added bonus that both images relied on bees as a visual element.
As I mentioned before the Avedon image is from a documentary project, and so there is an embedded veracity. The image by Taylor is clearly constructed, painterly, and a beautiful fantasy. Yet, it still holds some semblance of truth because the main image is a photograph.
However, the Avedon image is as constructed as Taylor's digital composite.
The subject of the Avedon photograph, Ron Fischer of rural Orion, Illinois, got the gig by responding to an ad in a beekeeper magazine looking for a person willing to be photographed with bees by a world-famous photographer. Since the project was a series of portraits from the western United States, the team decided to fly Mr. Fischer out to California for the shoot. This was supposed to make the image more truthful. Here is how they created the photograph.
To get the bees to land on Fischer, a university entomologist he was acquainted with patted queen bee pheromone (an attractant for other bees) onto several spots on Fischer’s head and chest.
Then, about 200 feet away, packages of bees were opened on the ground. The bees detected the pheromone and began to move.
Fischer still remembers watching the swarm of bees heading his way.
“They started forming a cloud over my head,” he says.
He wasn’t exactly scared, but he wasn’t sure what to expect, either, because he’d “never done anything like this before.
“Then they started landing on my head and chest. What was really something is that each bee has six legs. If you multiply that by thousands of bees, it sort of tickles over your bare skin.”
He was stung twice, but to no ill effect. Fischer posed for an hour-and-a-half the first day and a half-hour a second day.
When Avedon was finished, Fischer gently brushed off the bees, put on a shirt and got into a car.
The description of creating this photograph makes clear it is entirely a fictional construct, and yet it resides, and is one of the most iconic images, in this documentary project.
Maggie Taylor does not ask her viewers to believe the images are real; she creates fantasies, places for the imagination to play. She could create these images without any photographs, but all of her composites contain at least one photograph of a person. For me, this heightens the imaginary space; the photograph adds a veracity that lingers in the images. The photograph makes the viewer want to believe.
By the time Avedon makes his photograph, the battle over whether photography is objective or subjective is dead. Throughout the project he relies on the repetition of the white backdrop, diffused light and large format camera, to lull the viewer into believing all of the photos in the project are equally honest. Digital technology has renewed the debate on photographic truth; because it is so easy to manipulate photographs, we must view them with a skeptic's eye. In reality, photographers have always known how to bend the truth to serve their purpose.
During the conversation at the museum, a surprising aspect of this pair of images was that some people did not think Maggie Taylor should even be included because "she is not a photographer." It is true, she does not use a camera, and instead uses a flatbed scanner to create her composites. Still she uses the language of photography to make images, so while she may not be a photographer, she is at least a photographic artist. The practice of using photographs dates back to at least Dada and photomontage, which tracks to the proliferation of images in magazine due to the invention of halftone printing. Once the photograph ceases to be a precious object, artists start using it as a found object in their work.
Now add this video by Blind Melon featuring another bee girl. Here the bee suit is used as a metaphor for the awkwardness of adolescence, staying true to the muse, and searching for acceptance. It seems like a fun place to end.
Photo Credits:
Top Image - Richard Avedon, "Ronald Fischer, Beekeeper" 1981
Second Image - Maggie Taylor, "Girl in a Bee Dress" 2004
Thursday, January 22, 2015 at 6:04PM 
