what they would see if men were the size of bees...

in maurice maeterlinck's the life of bees, he imagines what a beehive would look like to a man the size of a worker bee. in juan antonio ramirez's book the beehive metaphor, he suggests that the forms and mechanics of manmade beekeeper's beehives influenced a number of modern architects, such as le corbusier, antonio gaudi, peter behrens, and bruno taut. since maeterlinck's text is quoted in ramirez's book, one is given a kind of permission to not only equate maeterlinck's text with a natural hive, but also a man made one. so one can look at the RPPC above (from eastern europe circa 1920), and imagine one of the men shrunken down to the size of a bee, given wings, and drifting inside. maeterlinck's description feels a bit psychedelic, and suggests the architecture of bruce goff as written about by jose luis borges...:

from the very top of a cupola greater in size than that in st. peter's in rome right down to the ground, enormous walls of wax, vertical, double and parallel, descend; enormous geometrical constructions suspended in the darkness and emptiness... each one of these walls, made of a substance which is still fresh, virginal, silvery and sweet-smelling is formed of thousands of cells containing sufficient food to feed an entire population for several weeks. here we can see the brilliant red, yellow, pink, and black stains caused by the pollen, the love juice of all the spring flowers in the transparent cells. all around, in long, magnificent, golden pendants, in rigid, immobile folds, the april honey lies in its twenty thousand sealed reservoirs which will only be opened in time of extreme need...

ramirez's book is full of interesting facts related to the history of bee keeping as well as architecture, and he draws lines between things in a much more intuitive way than most academics writing about architecture (i haven't read many who have written about bees...). i would highly recommend the book to anyone interested in such a personal approach to the intersection of seemingly disconnected histories.

when treehouses become cages...

when i first started buying photos, i looked at the subject and the overall mood, but i generally paid little attention to the background. the nice thing was that once i got home i would discover other things, incidentally or accidentally captured in the background... a street sign, a ghost image, a person, an object, etc.

nowadays, i usually scour the background of images pretty thoroughly at first approach, because there's always a chance i'll discover something more interesting than the central subject...

the above is a pretty nice picture of a band, probably from around 1890. the band and the instruments are great, but i was struck much more by the treehouse in the background. the form reminds me of german expressionist architects' drawings, and the forms of bruno taut. the two triangle forms, forming a square seem right out of alexander girard's vocabulary. the repeated curved elements of bent wood, just totally amazing and evoking that great painting by manet (even though manet's balcony railing forms are totally different)... this is folk art at its highest outsider homespun form.

if you look at the detail, you can see a little child hiding within what now becomes a cage (in a strange connection, in manet's balconly painting there is a little dog hiding in one corner). the deep dark serious eyes have the child looking very much like he was transported here from a 70's italian horror film (or perhaps as the reincarnated anger of manet's little dog). the blurred edges of the blankets make them seem like animal skins, and the atmosphere evokes a kind of tribal poetic darkness... is the youngster the king or the captured.

if one looks again at the band, you begin to wonder about the expressions on their faces. they don't look as happy as they did before you noticed the kid... in fact they look downright uncomfortable and slightly unsure...

for me, it's the beauty of not knowing the truths in these photos, that allows me to engage with them in so many different ways. in many cases their truths are, of course, unknown to me; and similarly, their subjects have no personal connection to my own family history. there is no baggage from overwhelming memories of a subject, so it is possible to enter an image from so many different vantage points - not only through eyes, but emotionally as well as the thinking mind.

the unintentional emptiness of specific known histories, allows them to exist as pure images, leaving the determination of life stories, value, and meanings to be brought to the table by any viewer. each captured single moment of stillness contains a wealth of possible narratives (both leading up to their moment of capture, as well as what might have come after), and allows one to continually be immersed in these tiny pictured worlds.