These are quiet, evocative pictures of a decisive moment. Not the split-second, eyeblink-ballet of the classic street photographer, but of a decisive moment beyond history. They are partly political, not from a stereotypical east or west pole, but a fusion of the two, as Bee has called it, "the chance of a third way". It is this precisely this kind of energetic, open-ended questioning, honest inner conflict, and sometimes synthesis that characterizes Bee's work, as well as his humanism and unabashed love for Russia and its people. What is happening to them is what eventually happens to all Empires and the people that live in them.
The first paired photographs were probably stereoscopic prints viewed with the naked eye. A decade later, dyptichs and multiples were being routinely produced by many portraitists. A notable example would be Nadar's self- "Revolving Portrait". Scientific motion studies, like Muybridge's, Etienne Marey's and Londes' utilized multiple images to document movement & dynamics. Shortly thereafter, their use became widespread in photographic media and continues to this day.
Duane Michals' narratives, Robert Frank's messages from the interior, Eve Sonneman's deeply saturated and highly personal cibas of street scenes and Ray Metzker's prone beachgoers on the grayish sand by Lake Michigan come to mind. They address very similar issues, sometimes sequentially, in which form, time (some look like movie frames), perspective, and content mirror and/or contrast each other. Conjoined images produce a relational, new gestalt, a third image that only exists in the viewer's mind.
Bee's accompanying text to this "Sublime" series tells of a cultural rite of passage, the waning of an era, and the waxing of another, all via signifiers.
What is a signifier? An indicator, a symbol, something of importance, a reminder of what was valued. In Bee's pictures, this is an open secret, camouflaged by its obviousness, an almost subliminal, meta-language (see Robert Graves' The White Goddess) people speak subconsciously through their objects, clothing, architecture, and media. A symbolic tongue that need not be intellectually or consciously mediated to be ingested, understood, and retransmitted.
During medieval times, several wealthy Kings and nobles created rooms filled with constellations of objects that signified their universe. Thanks to the marvels and terrors of mass-consumption, tiny, personalized analogs to the Wunderkammern (see Eco, Travels in Hyperreality) are common in most 1st & 2nd world homes. All of the things that constitute a human environment echo the identity, culture and zeitgeist of the person(s) that put it together. They inform the space, mirror the inhabitant's consciousness and sing to those, like Bee, that pass through, paying attention and connecting intimately with them.
Daguerre was perhaps the first photographer to depict objects symbolically. His "Cabinet of Curiosities, 1837", and the picture of the fossils stand out in this regard. A.J. Bellocq photographed extant interiors, focusing on the signifiers. As with so many other things in the medium, Atget was there, too. He photographed wealthy homes in Paris, while living on bread and milk. He also photographed his own small apartment in the same way. In both cases he explored some of the same concerns Bee has. Wright Morris did the same in the US.
These concerns can also be found, developed to an extreme, in 15th-17th century northern European painting, particularly Dutch paintings, like those by the three Jans, Van Eyck, Steen, and Vermeer, for whom the space, interiors and objects surrounding the subjects say as much as their clothes, faces, and gestures.
Encoded in Bee's pictures are the collective stories of millions of otherwise normal lives involved in an epic struggle, of red blood on white snow, decades of misery, hopes and aspirations snuffed out time and time again, yet reborn once more. People who were tossed about in the perfect storm of political and economic upheaval, many reduced to mere survival, some fighting to live, others seeking an icy, numbing bliss. The majority of Russians continued to do what people everywhere do, to try to live as best they could under the circumstances, and work towards a better future. It is largely through them that Bee envisions Russia. This is not a linear history, nor a conventional one. It is not about what we see in media or history books, for it lacks epic battles, victors and losers. This is an historical poem of the Russian heart.
Certain aspects of this time were addressed in Luc Delahaye's Winterreise, a journalistic "misery tour" done along the Trans-Siberian rail line stops. Delahaye said about his work: "I wanted to unsettle my eyes, distort the vision. It was made easier by doing it in Russia, the land of fiction, grotesque and distorted reality". Lise Sarfati's Acta Est also showed a "misery tour" of Siberia, how that part of Russia was falling like a leaf towards third-world status. Delahaye's is marked by the outsider-journalist-passing-through approach. Sarfati's is subtler, more studied. Both books relied on the spectacle of misery. The country is a land that has been bedeviled by spectacles from within and without.
While Bee is not blind to the miseries, his pictures show a different facet of the Russian story: One not fixated on sight or site. It is a straight vision, from an intimate foreigner's viewpoint, realism from someone who's lived there a majority of his life, before, during and after the Fall of the Soviet Empire. The ashes of that failed dream cover everything, and everywhere, there are reminders of what was valued, and increasingly, what is to come.
There are Luminist aspects to the work; Pop-Art derived sensitivities to mass-produced objects; a Colorist awareness that dances on the high-wire of the decorative; a sophisticated understanding of space; that delightful energy of potent emotions straining against a rigorous mind, and more.
I remember one of Bee's people, a dystopic-looking woman in a floral dress, the colors more than reminiscent of a painting by Pirosmanishvili. It floats in my memory like a plastic bag riding a hot, light breeze.
"...the absence of people in [my] photographs enhances their presence in the objects --- the structures, the artifacts, even the landscape suggest its appropriate inhabitant"
--- Wright Morris
A similar dynamic exists in Bee's work, and the objects/ structures/ landscapes conduct a hushed dialogue, like a grove of trees during Fall, about the passing of the old and ushering in of the new. This is done via architecture, monuments, interiors, the objects people fill their living rooms and bedrooms with, aging items in unopened drawers, cars, people and more, as if he were a poet- anthropologist. Like Muybridges' studies of the horses, the evanescent is rendered permanent, but not frozen, pinned and encased in glass, instead, kept alive in the open-ended discourse and dynamics of these images.
"Artists cannot change or make history. The most they can do is to strip it of pretenses"
--- John Berger, The Sense of Sight
Bee has done this, and embedded a secret history of his own, for he now has Russia in his veins and heart. The best of the USSR makes him melancholy, and disappears before his eyes. His memories of the future (see Bee's Holland notes) Russia is facing conspire with the past, and serve up an indictment of the present.
Welcome to Bee's Russia
On the right we have a colorful USSR display of flags, the Red Star at its base, forming a circle, and those red flags seem to come together at the top, like a teepee. A display that signifies unity, nationalism and passion to this viewer. On the left, is a night-time scene, what appears to be some sort of sign at the entrance to a fair or show. The flags here seem directional, as if guiding people towards a gate. The use of red here is in the sign, purely to get one's attention towards the venue. The picture on the left appears to be in a lesser, supportive role to the one on the right. One is an icon, the other a commercial sign.
On the left we have a tarnished metal statuette (on a trophy?) of a man bowling. He is all of one non-color, a gunmetal gray. The blur imparts a sense of motion, a conceptual vector to the ball that will never leave his hand, yet crosses into the picture on the right. There are visual layers formed by a vertically stepped wall giving a curious spatial doppler effect that articulates coherently with the ball's vector. Partially eclipsed behind that wall is a mosaic of boys playing soccer, their forms stylized in a similar way to Egyptian bas-reliefs. One of the figures is lying legs akimbo, obscured by the wall's edge. The entire (third) image compresses to the right, as if that ball is closing out, and perhaps toppling the figures on the right. There is a sense of the inexorable in this picture.
On the left a Soviet-era poster depicting a young couple in the foreground. Adam and Eve in the Worker's Paradizzo. He, a soldier, looking distantly with a responsible, slightly worried look, and she a blushing young bride, cheeks blushing wildly, smiling broadly and gazing adoringly at him. Behind them, a lone car cruises down the street. All the trees depicted have foliage, and in the background, every person is accompanied by others. There a family of three, to the left an adult and child. It is easy to conceive of the little silhouettes as this couple in different stages in life. Behind them, blocks of apartments (places to live and raise a family), and behind them, a crane, a sign of more being built. There are small red flags along the street in the background. On the right-hand frame, a closer view of one of those flags, looming behind a forbidding partition with lettering on it. A yellow light bulb glows in the foreground, but unlike the picture on the left, the colors are cold. Behind the red flag, a barren tree, the antithesis of implied fertility and socialization on the left. It is private, not public... and one gets the feeling that this is for an elite, not the common man.
This duet, one of my favorites in this series, feels like a Foundation Myth. On the right, that familiar oxygenated-blood red, this time in the guise of a tent, a warm enclosure with two covered tables and in the middle a double strand of lights, warm, orderly and sinuous divide the frame. I love the flags visible behind the translucent wall of the tent. A kind of cosmic sense of warmth, order, rite and more.
On the left, looking like entropy has set in, a field of cold star-like lights across a ceiling, spread out, disorderly, as if the Universe had finally cooled, life extinguished, and everything become equidistant.
On the left, an impossibly absurd, quasi-comical grotesque of a chimp holding handfuls of $100 dollar bills, and a case-full of them in a storefront display. On the right, a ripped, faded poster of a willful, defiant, clenched fist. Coupled, a potent indictment of the present.
[Note that in all of these images, there is little, if any, color that is incidental. Bee is fluent in its symbolic power and uses it expertly, seamlessly integrating it with other pictorial elements. See Albers, Itten, Farber and Kandinsky on this topic]
On the right, lyrical reliefs of flowers on brass, with delicate rosettes of lichens living on patina, looking like seeds scattering in the wind. On the left, a huge statue of a worker with fist held out, defiantly clenched, along the left edge of the frame, a Christmas tree branch with an ornament in the shape of a shiny red ball. My wife saw this image on the screen (before it became a dyptich) and remarked that it looked like a requiem for a lost cause. The fist seems to be reaching for the red ball that remains out of reach. Behind the statue, advertisements in English. But how do these interact? I look closer and notice there are two broken stems among the flowers on the right.