A reminder that snow can be beautiful
AGO collection includes image by first photographer to capture individual flakes
Wilson Alwyn Bentley, a cloud physicist, died of pneumonia in 1931, which he contracted after walking nine kilometres through a blizzard. Tragic, but almost the end one might choose to write for him.
Bentley’s life was devoted to the snow: photographing its delicate crystal structures, flake by flake.
He called them “tiny miracles of beauty” and their pursuit gave esthetic structure to his scientific life.
After many desperate attempts, beginning as a teen, Bentley finally achieved his goal in 1885: his first snowflake image, captured using a bellows camera attached to a microscope.
Over time, his technique shivered ever closer to perfection, catching the elusive ice crystals on cool black velvet and he never looked back. How good was he? So good, according to Kenneth Libbrecht, a renowned researcher of snowflake structures based, oddly, at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, “that hardly anyone (else) bothered . . . for almost 100 years.”
Over the years, he shot thousands of individual flakes, many of which he donated to the Jericho Historical Society in his Vermont hometown.
Another trove was given to the Buffalo Museum of Science and still others landed in private hands.
One set of those belonged to Toronto’s Anne and Harry Malcolmson, who donated their storied collection of photographs to the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2014, among them, the luminous, icy image you see here.
Not much can soften the arrival this week, however late, of slushy Southern Ontario snow, but maybe this view of the beauty amid the sludge helps at least a little.