Category: exploring place

From The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey:

“The child stretched out her arms and gazed down at the new coat…. It was the cool blue of a winter sky, with silver buttons that glistened like ice and white fur trim at the hood and cuffs and along the bottom edge. But the coat’s splendor came from the snowflakes. The varying sizes and designs gave them movement, so they seemed to twirl through the blue wool….”

From The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit:

“Trees dwindle; shrubs cling to the ground; and farther north nothing remains of the plant kingdom but low grasses, diminutive flowers, mosses and lichens hidden beneath the snow part of the year…. In winter, light can seem to shine upward from the white ground more than from the dark sky where the sun doesn’t rise or rises for an hour or two a day.”

From The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood:

“I look out at the dusk and think about its being winter. The snow falling, gently, effortlessly, covering everything in soft crystal, the mist of moonlight before a rain, blurring the outlines, obliterating color….”

The previous set in this series is here: Winter Scenes: Fragile Phenomena (Set 1 of 2).

I took these photos nearly a decade ago, in northern New York in the days following a snowstorm; they’re from a set of about 200 “found photos” from that trip in my archives. I started processing them after coming across the Thoreau quote I included in the previous post…

“Many of the phenomena of winter are suggestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy.”

… and tried to align the final images with the feeling that quotation suggests. With that in mind, I emphasized blue, white, and gray in the photos by increasing white brightness and eliminating most background color — to highlight instead the color and detail in each photo’s main subject. There are others I’ll be posting in the coming days that are landscape photos rather than closeups like these; but the 26 images I included in this post and the previous one struck me as very consistent with Whitman’s words.

Thanks for reading and taking a look. This will be my last post for 2018 while I work on a new theme for my self-hosted WordPress site … see you on the other side!

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From Angel’s Crest by Leslie Schwartz:

“He saw how the snow had come and changed the place, had made it new again…. He saw how pristine and stunning it was and he slipped, for a moment, into the past. He saw the glory that had been his life, the wide-open beauty of it, the hardships, the simplicity even when, back then, it had seemed so complicated and difficult. The beauty of the world made him feel, for a brief moment, like a man who had been delivered of all that had ever hurt or wounded him. The land, capped by snow and the splendor of winter, stretched out before him, miraculous and unparalleled in its breadth and beauty. He saw himself floating above it all … flying farther and farther away while the snowy world below disappeared from sight.”

From Walden and Other Writings by Henry David Thoreau:

“Many of the phenomena of winter are suggestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy.”

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