A finger held up against a flat turquoise sky. On its tip, a red gummy bear, half melted, slumping sideways and running down the knuckle in glossy threads. And on the gummy bear, gripping it with its front legs, a bumblebee — orange-banded, furry, wings folded back and catching the light — feeding.
The first thing to say is that this happened. You cannot direct a bumblebee. Somebody put a sweet on a finger and stood in the sun holding it up until a bee arrived, and somebody then got close enough with a macro lens to render the individual hairs on the thorax, and the bee did not leave. The melting is the clock in the picture: the longer the wait, the further the gummy bear collapses, and it has collapsed a long way.
I like this photograph more than I can entirely justify. It is a picture about sugar — the bee has come for the same thing we come for and has been fooled, since there is nothing in a gelatin sweet that will do a bee the slightest good. There is a whole essay in there about artificial sweetness and the creatures it attracts, and about fashion, presumably, since this was made for that world. But mostly what I feel is the low animal pleasure of watching something get away with it: the bee eating, the finger holding still, and the sky doing nothing at all.
A finger held up against a flat turquoise sky. On its tip, a red gummy bear, half melted, slumping sideways and running down the knuckle in glossy threads. And on the gummy bear, gripping it with its front legs, a bumblebee — orange-banded, furry, wings folded back and catching the light — feeding.
The first thing to say is that this happened. You cannot direct a bumblebee. Somebody put a sweet on a finger and stood in the sun holding it up until a bee arrived, and somebody then got close enough with a macro lens to render the individual hairs on the thorax, and the bee did not leave. The melting is the clock in the picture: the longer the wait, the further the gummy bear collapses, and it has collapsed a long way.
I like this photograph more than I can entirely justify. It is a picture about sugar — the bee has come for the same thing we come for and has been fooled, since there is nothing in a gelatin sweet that will do a bee the slightest good. There is a whole essay in there about artificial sweetness and the creatures it attracts, and about fashion, presumably, since this was made for that world. But mostly what I feel is the low animal pleasure of watching something get away with it: the bee eating, the finger holding still, and the sky doing nothing at all.