Sweet... or just sick?

Photographer Blake Little was photographing one of his subjects, who he said looked 'bear-ish', when the sweet idea came to him.

Little said he originally planned to shoot the model as he was eating honey, but found it too cliche and planned to scrap the idea. That is until he became captivated by the way the substance looked dripping off the man's hands.

'It looked like he was preserved in amber,' Little said in a video documenting his photo shoot. 'That was the whole start of the process.' 

And so 'Preservation', a series of photographs featuring subjects of all shapes and sizes covered in vats of the sweet, sticky substance, was born. 

Little used 1,000 pounds of honey every week he shot for the collection, and found models that ranged from a one-and-a-half year old child to an 85-year-old woman using both Craigslist and professional model and dance agencies. 

The honey was shipped in five-pound containers, and was collected as it dripped off the models for re-use.

Little said he wanted to use a variety of people with different body types to show how the honey had 'a way of democratizing' them, transforming the subjects 'in kind of a universal way'.

Because the honey forces the models to shut their eyes, Little said the most important part of the photographs is how they show the subjects' physical reaction to the act of being covered in the substance.

'People react different to the experience and that creates the emotion of the picture,' he told Slate. 'Those different responses created some of the power in the photos.' 

(dailymail.co.uk)