Photographs by Laurynas Skeisgiela
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Honies is a series of sunflower portraits taken with an ultraviolet camera on a hot and radiant summer day. The ultraviolet camera reveals how harmful UV radiation invisible to the human eye illuminates the bodies. Ultraviolet photographs show dark stretches in the heads of sunflowers – bee landing sites. Bees see ultraviolet light and use it to collect pollen, directing their routes towards the patterned petals. The bees remember the plants they visited and collect pollen of the same colour and type during one flight – this consistency is also reflected in the series of the sunflower photographs.
Sunflowers were chosen for their exceptional appearance – their “heads”, facing the light as if solar collectors, following the path of the sun. Exhausted and withered by the heat of the sun, the sunflowers look into the camera lens and become images fluctuating between the styles of portrait photography and scientific documentation.