Small Models, Big Opportunities

Every summer I take pictures of bees, drawn to their mysterious energy. When the bee season ended in 2006, I wondered what I was going to take pictures of if the bees were done producing honey for the year. I thought, "What if I created a miniature world of bees and apiaries?" This way I would be able to continue working with the idea of bees and elaborate on my idea of bees as mythical. Plus I could more easily create the narrative I had written about a man who discovers a lost world of bees.

My Miniature Apiary series felt limitless for me. I could do just about anything: make a mountain range, build a multitude of tiny hives, make bees that glow. There were no limits to my imagination; however, there were a few stumbling blocks as far as technique and skill were concerned. First I had to figure out how to how to actually make the miniatures. What materials should I use, I wondered. How do I make bees that glow from within? As I began to figure things out by trial and error, I wondered how others had done it before me.

Diorama Days

The idea of the reconstructed photograph has been around for some time. I think my fascination with reconstructed scenery began as a child, while I wandered through the Museum of Man and Nature in Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada. The first thing you see when you walk into the museum is a large diorama of buffalo on the Great Plains being pursued by a native man on a horse. It is simultaneously ominous and breathtaking. So a few years ago when I discovered Gregory Crewdson's Natural Wonder Series, which emulates the dioramic bird scenery found at the New York Museum of Natural History, I immediately thought back to my childhood fascination with those dioramas.

Crewdson lights his pictures like movie sets. There are highlighted backgrounds, key lights, and fill lights. This concept of setting up a scene in a cinematic way subconsciously planted a seed in my brain. I thought this was a great approach to photography. It had myriad art forms in one: Painting (the false backdrop was often painted), sculpture (the constructed scene), and, of course, photography (the finished image). I was fascinated with the idea that the three-dimensional image could be manipulated by altering anything within the scene. And there was something deeper in his work that spoke to me; I connected with the way Crewdson captures the light and his subjects. I was intrigued by the control he exerted over his images and the way he could express a vision so fantastically fraught with emotion. I liked the idea of using a photorealistic backdrop, with a physical three-dimensional scene in front of it. When my Miniature Apiary series started, these ideas were already in my mental file folder.

Paper Cuts

Much later on, when I had already been working on my series, I found a photo book by Thomas Demand. When I first glanced through it, I thought the images looked real, but as I went on I realized that he had painstakingly constructed everything out of paper. The scenes that he creates are life size, recreated from memory or pictures. I was fascinated by the meticulous nature of his work -- especially an elaborate jungle scene that he had created out of paper. In his print called "Clearing," the light travels through the leaves in such a way that you would think you were looking at a still image from the BBC Planet Earth series.

Inspired by his work, I went home and attempted to make tiny leaves one by one for a scene with my twelve-inch beekeepers. Several hours later, as my hands cramped up, I realized the amount of work that went into making miniature leaves. To cover an entire tree, one foot high, would take me several weeks. This seemed impossible, and unrealistic. I put that idea on the back burner and continually wondered how Demand did it.

Unfortunately, there are no how-to books on specific miniature work. There are general books that deal with train scenery modeling, but they are not going to tell you how to make a bee. Therefore, a huge part of my work is experimentation.