Congratulations Olivia!

Check out Olivia’s intimate interview with curator Ken Miller below:

A Visual Tale of Teenage Life

by Ken Miller

Frankly, it’s a bit odd asking a 16-year-old photographer about how she began her photographic career. She is beginning her creative career, so it’s not as if she has had the perspective of years to focus her aesthetic choices. Unless that photographer happens to be Olivia Bolles, better known through her Flickr name Olivia Bee. Though still a junior in high school, Bee already works as a photographic professional – with clients and an agent – which makes discussing the origins of her work entirely appropriate.

Bee first began shooting when she was 11 years old, not entirely voluntarily. As a student at a school with a specialized program in the arts, she was required to pick up a camera as part of her curriculum. By her own admission, it was not love at first sight. ‘When I first started shooting, I took a lot of pictures of stuffed animals and Christmas ornaments. Things that wouldn’t be embarrassed [to be photographed] and that I wouldn’t be embarrassed [to photograph]…’

Somehow, she stuck with it, though she now reflects that her early encounters with photography were ‘kind of forced.’ Bee slowly became more comfortable photographing her friends, the presence of a camera providing a convenient prop for adolescent socializing. What began as the casual documentation of her scene has, over the years, turned into a self-aware depiction of the romanticism of teenage life. Admittedly inspired by Ryan McGinley, Bee has developed a colour-saturated aesthetic filled with semi-improvisatory, sometimes-staged ecstatic moments, and this portfolio includes one of Bee’s favourite images: the distinctly McGinley-esque photo of Bee and her boyfriend nearly kissing underwater.

‘I basically always have my camera with me,’ Bee says. ‘I feel naked without a camera. Especially when I’m hanging out with people, if I don’t have my camera, I don’t know what to do.’ As Bee has matured, so has both the quality of her photographs and her relationship to picture-taking. ‘Taking photos has made me notice things. Photography has made me way more aware [of my surroundings].’ All the while, Bee has posted her photographs online, and her photo stream now contains well over 1,000 images, dating back to 2007. This archive very easily could have been the end of it, a repository for youthful ambition. A precociously creative kid, Bee would have moved on to college and possibly become an artist or possibly not, as so many young photography students have. Instead, Converse came calling.

When the Nike subsidiary’s agency first contacted Bee, ‘I thought it was a spam email, so I just disregarded it,’ she recalls. ‘Brilliant, huh?’ But after a little persistence, Bee agreed to participate in a shoot, despite being ‘super nervous and freaked out.’ An unsurprising reaction considering that she was 14 at the time. The experience of participating in a commercial campaign was abrupt and overwhelming. ‘There were 30 Converse people in my house every day,’ she remembers. ‘But I got to ride my bike around school, which was cool.’ Bee now speaks with (slightly disconcerting) familiarity about the various agencies and creative directors that she’s worked with, and manifests astounding confidence about the lessons she’s rapidly learned about working professionally. Clients such as Nike, Harper Collins and &Samhoud have since found her through Flickr, where she has approximately 20,000 contacts, and Bee now works professionally through her representative.

In the Converse video, Bee’s voice narrates footage of the young photographer wearing short shorts, pedalling her bike down her school’s highway as she muses, ‘I’m really driven to capture the moments of teenage life. I especially like people laughing and having fun being this age, the social life of high school and the confusion of high school.’ For a generation raised on the manipulated self-revelations of Facebook, portraying youth culture for an advertisement came naturally to Bee’s classmates. Her preference is still to shoot her friends rather than professional models, and she says that, ‘Part of the thing for me is the connection between model and photographer. It’s pretty apparent when I see photos where the photographer and the model have nothing to do with each other.’ To that end, she’s developed the habit of spending at least a couple of days hanging out and getting dinner with her models before any shoot.

Bee’s preference for including her friends in advertising projects has lead to conflicts with some parents concerned about commercial exploitation. When it came time to sign the release forms for Converse, ‘Some people’s parents freaked out,’ she says. ‘Like, “Oh my God, you’re ‘selling our children!” It was something ridiculous.’ Both wiser and more naïve in the ways of contemporary media, Bee’s friends did not share in that parental concern. ‘They like being in front of the camera,’ Bee says, ‘I mean, why not? They’re perfect-looking all the time!’

Still, Bee admits, ‘I’ve gotten super underpaid in the past. Things like that really piss me off. I may be a 16-year-old, but I’m working as a professional, so you might as well pay me as a professional.’ She also admits that, ‘A lot of people don’t hire me because I’m young, [but] personally, I love my age right now, because I have so much fun all the time.’ With a couple of commercial projects under her belt, Bee has been shooting long enough to be self-reflexive about her appeal. ‘As a photographer, I can make [my age] work to my advantage or my disadvantage. It just depends on who you’re talking to. People will either say that I’m 16 and inexperienced and can’t shoot anything or they’ll say I’m 16 and have a new look and should shoot everything.’

Yet, despite already possessing a fully developed audience and career, Bee is a photographer still exploring her own voice. If there is any risk to the unusual early affirmation that she has received, it is that the quick reward will serve to stunt her long term creative development. Her early images, though pleasing on the eye, risked banality in their loveliness. And in some ways, her most notable asset with regards to commercial work, was also arguably her greatest flaw: she is so intimate with her subjects and so eager to construct a romantic narrative through her images of her friends, that she lacked the perspective to give her photographs the sharp edged insight that would make them endure.

Speaking by Skype, she casually mentions, ‘I’m really working on my identity right now, and that’s been taking a lot of time.’ Despite alternating between film and digital, Bee maintains, ‘I try to be really consistent with my colour scheme, just because that’s my signature: really blue blues and the pinky-blue skin.’ Perhaps the example set by McGinley is apt in another sense as well, since he began his career shooting diaristic images of his friends behaving badly; in addition to criticism of the photographs’ drug and dick-filled subject matter, some viewers were put off by the obvious debt the pictures owed to Nan Goldin, a New York photographer of an earlier generation. Yet, though McGinley’s early photos won him notoriety, he continued to evolve his style, drifting into the more abstract and ethereal mode of expression that has influenced Bee. It is this later, radically different photographs that have come to define McGinley’s legacy, so it is intriguing to speculate what future work will come to define Bee.

Bee freely attests that she is still exploring new influences and inspirations, both on her own and through school, and says she is currently particularly intrigued by 1970s rock photography luminaries such as Annie Leibovitz. Her favourite retro images are of her own parents before they wed. ‘My parents were studs, oh my god! They were really tight!’ she exclaims before acknowledging that they’re still ‘pretty hip’ despite being 45. In a way, immediate nostalgia is the overwhelming quality of Bee’s images – a reminiscence of a moment that she is currently experiencing and regrets having to leave behind.

‘I have no idea what I’m going to be doing in 5 years, 10 years. Even next weekend, I have no idea what I’m going to be doing.’ So in that sense, perhaps, she is not entirely different from other young photographers who would only aspire to her success, such as the teens submitting photos to the Whitney Museum, in conjunction with a recent road trip exhibition by Lee Friedlander. In fact, one of Bee’s plans post-graduation is to go on a road trip to check out some music festivals and roller coasters. Photographically, this gibes with her growing interest in shooting domestic environments and landscapes, which demonstrate a newfound emotional ambiguity.

Recent images in Bee’s Flickr stream showcase her ongoing experimentation with tools such as double exposure, rugged black and whites, and shocking notes of unnatural colour. If her early work was astoundingly proficient for such a young photographer, her new work is disconcerting because of how successfully she has come to embrace a variety of styles and an expanded palette. Moreover, she is carrying out this aesthetic dialogue in public – each new post receives dozens of comments, ranging from text-speak accolades to long form tribute poems. Somehow, Bee seems to be both receptive and unaffected.

‘I don’t really care [about the attention],’ Bee proclaims. ‘I do what I want, and if people like it, that’s cool. I’m doing all of this stuff for me. Even if I fail as a photographer, I’m still going to be doing it.’ No matter what, she’ll have the pictures to prove it.