Frode Fjerdingstad.
Cinematographer, photographer, editor and director.
Contact: you (at) frode.me
Working at NRK - The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation.
Clients:
FRODE & MARCUS — BEEKEEPER
(L—B. 002) Published by Livraison Books 2013
In the backwoods of a deserted landscape a man is busy conducting bizarre experiments on bees. He views himself as their protector and caretaker. But there’s something unnerving about his methods. His intentions are literally veiled as we never see his face. A faint post-apocalyptic aura hangs over it all. Everything is marked by slow decay. Between sudden fits of anger and excitement lethargy seems to come over him. Long lost in his own universe, the man goes about his business oblivious to the outside world. If such a world even exists.
It’s impossible to say who the man we meet in Frode & Marcus photo novel Beekeeper actually is. This is one of many enigmas that the novel won’t give away. In all its ambiguity this carefully constructed tale of isolation, disorder and new becomings asks us to descend into the deepest layers of our subconscious.
Thus, any possible explanation as to the identity of the story’s anti-hero is perpetually kept on hold. He could be part of a shady military experiment gone wrong or an outcast from a strange tribe of woodsmen. And if this is an interior journey through a muddled mind that we’ve embarked on, well it’s very hard to say, since the only thing to go on is the visual manifestations of the beekeeper’s state of mind.
Despite the omnipresence of an almost romantic sunlight reminiscent of Aleksandr Sukorov’s hallucinatory 1987 film Days of Eclipse, Beekeeper is touched by an undercurrent of catastrophe that gradually contaminates everything. Most of all, it appears to have taken hold of the man’s mind. The secret of bees seems to have given his existence an unclear purpose in this beautiful but isolated sun-tinged universe.
And this is crucial. Because in the end the big question raised here is existential. Every human being strives to establish some purpose in life. But what if purpose becomes an obsession that overtakes life? Determined to crack whatever the code of bees may be, the anti-hero of Beekeeper leaves chaos in his wake.
The allure of the highly organized life of bees is, in a sense, understandable. Bees serve a greater purpose that the beekeeper seems to lack. They live, they play their part in reproduction with predictable monotony, they die. Clean and simple. The beekeeper, on the other hand, is an incarnation of the darkest forces of human nature. He is fallible, confused and lonely. He can never be sure that he has found his nirvana. In the end, to paraphrase Samuel Beckett, he can at the most hope to fail better the next time he tries to solve the mystery of the bees.
EDITION: 333 FORMAT: 330 X 230 MM PAGES: 76 IMAGES: 70 PRINT: FULL FLUORESCENT COLOR ISBN: 978—91—980225—1—3
Graupunkt. Frode & Marcus
“Grey is its own complement, grey has no opposite. The color grey is often associated with aging or the passage of time. Grey may represent a color, grey may be neutral. A point is a 0-dimensional object.”
Frode & Marcus
On assignment from the Paris & Stockholm based publisher Libraryman Co., Ltd. – the Scandinavian photographers duo Frode & Marcus have taken a roadtrip around the twisty mountain roads of Norway. The project resulted in Graupunkt, a photobook including black and white images of Norwegian landscapes and an essay by the New York based writer, critic and editor, Julie Cirelli.
Softcover + transparent cover
170 x 130mm (6.7 x 9 inches)
36 pages b/w offset
ISBN: 978-91-86269-00-5
First Edition
Printed in an edition of 500 copies, numbered and signed