Seneca Honey

The Seneca Honey series incorporates figures, honey, bees, and hives. Unlike Goodine’s earlier large format works, which were shot using a 4 x 5 Graflex and reversal film, these constructed sets were photographed using a digital camera and scanner. Many works from the series were shot in upstate New York at a honey farm near the home where Goodine was raised. Creating sets in the “hot room” where the honey is collected and prepared, Goodine used beeswax and honey as integral elements in the set constructions. Directly addressing memory and death and how, historically, photography has been understood to function as a medium that stills and freezes time, the Honey Dip series connects the body’s indelible relation to place and the collaboration between the two in the construction of memory. Conceptually, the body is a vehicle by which memory is captured within the poetics of space. At the time Goodine was creating this body of work, she was revisiting Sylvia Plath’s Bee poems, connecting the author’s suicide with the life of bees and her own childhood experiences in ways that became pictorially haunting.