There is an environmental mystery afoot, and it begins with a seemingly trivial detail that reveals a disaster of global proportions.
One day, you notice that the honey you slather on your morning toast is more expensive.
Instead of switching to jam, you investigate the reason for the price hike.
What you find is shocking.
The number of domesticated honeybees in the US has been decreasing at an alarming rate.
This decline appears too big to be explained by the usual causes of bee death alone: disease, parasites or starvation.
A typical crime scene has almost no adult bees left in the hive, except, perhaps, a lonely queen and a few other survivors.
It's full of untouched food stores and a brood of unborn larvae, suggesting that the adults vacated without waiting for them to hatch.
But what's particularly eerie is that there's no tell-tale mass of dead or dying bees nearby.
Either they have forgotten their way back to the hive, or they have simply disappeared.
These mysterious disappearances aren't new.
Humans have been collecting honey for centuries.
But it wasn't until European settlers in the 1600's introduced the subspecies, Apis mellifera, that we domesticated bees.
Since the 19th century, beekeepers have reported occasional mass disappearances, giving them enigmatic names like disappearing disease, spring dwindle disease and autumn collapse.
But when in 2006 such losses were found to affect more than half of all hives in the US, the phenomenon got a new name: colony collapse disorder.
The most frightening thing about this mystery isn't that we'll have to go back to using regular sugar in our tea.
We farm bees for their honey, but they also pollinate our crops on an industrial scale, generating over 1/3 of America's food production this way.
So, how can we find the culprit behind this calamity?
Here are three of the possible offenders.
Exhibit A: Pests and Disease.
Most infamous is the varroa mite, a minuscule red pest that not only invades colonies and feeds on bees, but also transfers pathogens that stunt bee growth and shortens their life span.
Exhibit B: Genetics.
The queen is the core of a healthy hive.
But nowadays, the millions of queen bees distributed in commercial hives are bred from just a few original queens, which raises the worry about a lack of genetic diversity which could weaken bees' defenses against pathogens and pests.
Exhibit C: Chemicals.
Pesticides used both on commercial beehives and agricultural crops to ward off parasites could be getting into the food and water that honeybees consume.
Researchers have even found that some pesticides damage the honeybees' homing abilities.
So we have a file full of clues but no clear leads.
In reality, scientists, the actual detectives on this case, face disagreement over what causes colony collapse disorder.
For now, we assume that several factors are the cause.
Honeybees aren't necessarily in danger of extinction, but fewer bees overall means less pollination and higher food costs, so it's crucial that scientists solve the case of the vanishing bees.
Because while having less honey might be a buzzkill, crop shortages are something that would truly sting.
I'm often asked why I do art, what do I want to say with my art photography, and what is the use of it?
Once in a while I start to worry how to actually measure the impact from the art like we do with medicine or technology, where we can see the results and calculate it.
Then I would finally be able to explain to my mother my art with real numbers.
But my art is so far from metrics, and moreover, my photography is widely exposing the theme of escapism.
My theory is that all of us struggle sometimes to escape in order to analyze our reality, appreciate it or change.
I don't work with daily life as it is, and I'm not a documentary photographer in the common sense.
But I am a documentary photographer in a different sense.
I document dreams.
I work with daily life as it could be, as I imagine it.
I am a daydreamer, but at the same time I love things that are authentic and deal with our innermost nature, which I would never want to escape from.
I adore complicated personalities, and real life inspires me to create my images.
Real life inspires our escape, and sometimes that escape is very needed.
I believe heroes are not created easily, and I choose to work with individuals who are survivors and facing everyday routines that are not always full of color, people who are on their way to a better life, fighting against life circumstances.
Why do I choose people like that for my models?
Because I've been in that position myself, when I had to learn how to survive in real life.
I was a student living abroad in London.
I was working at two places at the same time as a waitress.
Obviously that wasn't my dream job, but I decided to play a game where I imagined that I am taking a role in a film, and in the film I am a waitress, and I need to act great.
I used to dye my hair and brows to gingerette, I changed my hair to curly perm, I lost weight and made myself believe I am just a character acting in a film.
That isn't forever, that is all just temporary.
That helped me a lot.
It motivated me to change my life and take a hard time as a game.
Now, as an artist, I am creating different lives for my models in order to give them the experience of being someone else in reality.
Through the photographic process, all of my models become like silent movie actors.
They are captured at the moment when they believe in being someone else entirely.
In order to create a new reality in its entirety, I physically create every single thing in my work, sometimes from outfits to the stage.
Because I work with analogues, and I don't make any digital manipulations to my photographs, I need everything to take place in reality, in spite of the fact that nowadays, digitally, you can create pretty much everything.
I don't like this path.
Even if that reaches perfection, I see the beauty in authenticity of making, and that's impossible without flaws.
A digitally manipulated photograph is not true for me.
It doesn't capture anything real.
It's not experienced, not motivating.
It's like, instead of going traveling, you look at someone else's travel photographs.
What I find so exciting is the ability to make people's dreams of being someone else a reality.
That's like a drug which pushes me to keep working, even without metrics.
One of my models had always dreamed of being seen as a warrior, but she wasn't able to do sports because of her health problems.
Half a year ago, she passed away from heart disease at the age of 22.
But two days before her death, the images we spent months working on together of her as a warrior she dreamed of becoming were published at a large exhibition in Milan by Vogue Magazine.
All her life was about overcoming.
Before she died, she had known that thousands of people saw her image from the land of escapism and believed in her as a brave and fearless warrior.
For my work, I invite people to play a game like we all used to as children when we pretend to be someone else and that process made us really happy.
To my mind it is important for grown-ups.
We need these transformations to enact this in the name of art.
It gives us the very real feeling of being important and powerful in order to influence our reality.
I know this from my own personal experience.
I have had so many versions of myself through my self-portraits that I've been many different characters.
Being someone else in the land of escapism doesn't exactly give us numbers that we can gauge, but it's like a real lost form of magic which exists but can't be measured.
There is a unique power in art to transform and lift our limits.
Art creates what I call a conjured life, which helps our existence and pushes, motivates and inspires us to dwell and express ourselves without metrics or calculations.
Thank you.
(Applause)