“Quick, the
first flakes are coming; the couriers of the coming snow storm. Open the
skylight, and directly under it place the carefully prepared blackboard, on
whose ebony surface the most minute form of frozen beauty may be welcome from
cloud-land. The mysteries of the upper air are about to reveal themselves, if
our hands are deft and our eyes quick enough.”
“Winter is
now settling over December, with flurries on brisk mornings and heavy snows
that muffle the night. It was in this season of cold that Wilson Bentley, a
farmer in Jericho, Vermont, attempted to capture the fleeting geometry of the
snowflake with his DIY contraption of a microscope combined with a bellows
camera. In 1885, at the age of 19, he became the first known person to
photograph a snowflake, but it was hardly his last. Working until his death in
1931, Bentley photographed more than 5,000 snowflakes."
Today his
work is appreciated as much as an artistic archive as a meteorological one. His
photographs were recently featured in The Keeper at the New Museum, and his
bellows camera and photographs are preserved in an ongoing Snowflake Bentley
exhibition at the Jericho Historical Society. His glass-plate photomicrographs
were donated to the Buffalo Museum of Science, which has digitized the
collection online.
Even
altered by the hand of Bentley, these images represent beautiful ghosts from a
winter that bristled the air over a century ago. As it happens, it was in one
of those harsh storms that Bentley was overtaken by the weather he so loved.
After walking six miles home through a blizzard in 1931, the same year his
exhaustive Snow Crystals monograph was published, he died of pneumonia on
December 23, on the farm, the snow stacking up around him. “
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