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VIDEO BY NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
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Walking on set, Angelina moved within six inches of a swarm ball of 60,000 of them. “She was some kind of fearless,” Dan says.
She didn’t wear bee protection, and came unshowered, because bees attack scents. “I told her, ‘You need to smell like an organism.’”
Angelina posed for 18 minutes, staying focused even as one bee crawled under her dress and was climbing up her thigh. “She never once even flinched,” Dan says. “There was never a moment of like, ‘Ooh,’ or anything. It was like she’d just kind of done this her whole life and this was sort of this laissez-faire experience for her. And I was incredibly impressed by that. I was the only person on the crew that didn’t wear any protection. I kind of did it in solidarity.“
Dan and Angelina set out to make an image that would honor the bees. And, after the prep and research, they collaborated on an image that pays homage as well to Avedon—both to his original Beekeeper photograph and to the technique used to create it. Oh, and this new image has become a phenomenon, getting 2.4 million likes on our Instagram page in a day.
I asked Dan: How would Avedon, who died in 2004, have reacted?
“I like to think that if I were 97 years old and someone re-created one of my images, I would be deeply touched,” Dan says. “So hopefully he would have thought the same.”
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