The jumping-off point for my Bare Handed series was a bird becoming trapped in the netting around the raspberry bushes in my backyard. It made me think of the problem humans have interacting with the natural world. How do we navigate obtaining food and the other things we need while still being good stewards of the land?
I’d seen work by photographers demonstrating how Big Agriculture was destroying the environment. I wanted to find people who took a respectful approach, tried to work in tandem with it, but who might be in a fearful or dangerous situation. I approached Les, the man in this picture, after speaking to the director of an exhibition space in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who had hired him to remove a feral beehive from his tree.
I’d already tried to photograph another beekeeper who wore a full protective suit, but he might as well have been an astronaut. With Les, I was able to stay nearby and work with him over three days. The first couple involved straightforward documentary pictures of him tending his hives.
Then, on the third day, his apprentice Amber showed up to help. Les had the queen bee in a cage in his shirt pocket and asked Amber to take it out. Wherever the queen is, the rest of the colony will swarm.
There’s a picture I made where Les and Amber are joined together by bees, and that was my “ah ha!” moment. Amber took out the queen and placed her in Les’s hand, which is where the bees went next. He looked at me with his hands full of bees and said: “Should I put them on my face?” I said: “Sure!” Les slowly moved his hands up to his face.
Bees don’t like hair, which is why they’re not in his beard or the top of his head. He closed his eyes for a few minutes, and I photographed. Afterwards, he said: “You know, I couldn’t hear anything but the buzzing.” I don’t think he’d ever done that before.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
