Her fast-moving young fun-spirited photographs are just the start. From Gucci dresses to looks that allow her to play with gender roles – Olivia Bee is one to watch.
Olivia Bee is a photographer and director from Portland, Oregon. Her magical and beautiful imagery revolves around the youth, the brief and the oneiric.
Shortly after moving to the area, Bee met her boyfriend, Joe. They lived together with two horses, Bella and Scooter, plus some chickens and a rooster named Mr Cock.
The landscape in Oregon is also “a character in their lives: Big Ponderosa pines mark the passing of time, and a creek supplies them with drinking, cooking, and bathing water,” says Cut.
In her early teens, Olivia Bee started taking pictures, one of those rare precocious talents who already had the basics nailed before most of us had figured out how to make our lava lamps work. And when I say basics, I mean being commissioned to shoot commercials for Nike and Converse by the time she was 17.
Having emerged during the peak Tumblr years, Bee has continued to carve a name for herself with candid photographs that capture the intensity of youth, the fragile nexus of love, and the yearning for the wild. Bee’s pictures are often situated near nature, away from the apparent limitations of the city and the responsibilities that lie therein.
With a knack for powerful juxtapositions, “Olivia Bee’s photographs have a corpuscular quality that capture individual moments in time but which together weave a broader narrative about the transient nature of youth,” says The Journal.
The 27-year-old Olivia Bee, based in Los Angeles, has since done editorial work for the New York Times, Harper’s, Der Speigel, Seventeen, and others. She’s done commissioned work for Katy Perry, American singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers, MTV, and YouTube Music, and featured in both solo and group exhibitions.
In Bee’s own words, she is “intrigued by the beauty of everyday life and how the beauty of memories (real or imagined) touches us.”
