Avedon has often said that he's not a journalist because he works in fiction. More obviously than some of the others, this image shows that it is a great work of invention. Avedon dreamed up the image of a man covered in bees, sketched it, and advertised in beekeeper trade journals for months before he found Ronald Fischer, the man you see here. We'll let him tell you the story of the shoot.

We did the setup on the side of a barn, and they put the background up and next thing you know, they said Ok we're all ready and he says now take off your shirt . . . Which meant that I would be bare-chested and then in all off the years of beekeeping I had never worked bare-chested in a bee yard before, and I said okay, now wait a minute. You have to tell me what's going to be done here . . . So after getting over the initial shock that I would be standing there bare-chested with the bees walking all over my chest, the queen pheromone was applied to my chest and head. And the queen pheromone is an odor that the queen gives off to keep all the bees in that particular hive . . . So there was a cloud of bees in the air and they started forming over head because they picked up the queen pheromone odor.