The Pageant was taken during the superbloom summer of 2020 on the Door County peninsula of Wisconsin as part of the Anthophilia series.

Anthophilia is the obsessive love of flowers.  An anthopile is any creature who regularly visits them.

In the isolation of the summer of 2020 I began taking long walks in the abundant meadows that decorate Door County with my loyal and athletic partner, Peenut.  In the chaos that was that year, I was lucky to have the means to notice that, silently, a superbloom was happening.

Sometimes you are just in the right place at the right time to witness something iconic, and with all the people tucked behind closed doors, the animals ventured a little futher, and spread the meadows until they exploded with every variety of field bloom.  The pollinators, for a short time, had nature to themselves.  

I fell in. I like the beetles, wasps, bumbles and aphids, became an anthopile. 

Working with hand carried backdrops in a range of colors from white to grey and blue, I captured vignettes of the relationships between the wildflowers and the anthopiles.

The image was taken in the field and is a natural, no-cut, no interference vignette.  No flowers were harmed in the making of this photograph except perhaps those that sadly fell to my footprints as I meandered in the meadows.