Winter as a Limiting Exercise
Any regular reader of this blog knows that I love a limiting exercise imposed upon my work; any regular acquaintance of mine knows that I can’t stand one imposed upon my actual life. Unfortunately, the latter is inevitable, especially in upstate New York in January. As I write this we’re in the middle of a weeks-long cold snap, and no cozy fire or bubbling stew can dispel my ever-intensifying desire to walk around in tee shirt in jeans, or bring the kids to a park, activities I will be taking for granted in a few months.
But winter can inspire, however imperiously, by serving as a convenient narrower of creative options, or of course as a subject of art in itself. I haven’t written much about winter, but I can think of a few beloved books on the subject; Adalbert Stifter’s spooky Christmas novella Rock Crystal springs to mind (or, I guess, winters to mind), with its child protagonists lost in a dreamlike landscape of rock, snow, and glacial ice:
As far as the eye could reach there was only ice. Pointed masses and irregular clumps thrusting up from the fearsome snow-encrusted ice. Instead of a barricade that could be surmounted, with snow beyond, as they had expected, yet other walls of ice rose from the buttress, cracked and fissured, with innumerable meandering blue veins, and beyond these walls, others like them; and beyond, others, until the falling snow blurred the distance in its veil of grey.
Beebe Lake, Cornell University
I also think of Anna Kavan’s hallucinatory Ice, an unsettling, unstructured novel about glacial ice enveloping the earth in the aftermath of war; some critics have read this nuclear winter as symbolic of Kavan’s mental illness and heroin addiction, and sure, maybe, but I love this book’s crystalline focus on small details, which honors them as important in their own right, outside the burden of metaphorical interpretation:
A strong colorless light was making everything outside as clear as day, although I was quite unable to see where it came from. My amazement increased when I observed that this extraordinary light revealed details not normally visible to the naked eye. It was snowing slightly, and the complex structure of each individual snowflake appeared in crystalline clearness, the delicate star-like, flower-like forms perfectly distinct and as bright as jewels.
For Martin F, by Ursula von Rydingsvard, at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum
Weird in a completely different way, Ali Smith’s Winter, the second in her quartet of seasonal novels, explodes into colorful fragments like a Christmas cracker, using a family’s winter reunion as springboard (or, forgive me, winterboard) to ponder, comically, the politics and cultural mores of contemporary Britain. A metafictional riff, in the head of matriarch Sophia, sends up
the kind of quality literary fiction where the slow drift of snow across a landscape is merciful, has a perfect muffling decorum of its own, snow falling to whiten, soften, blur and prettify even further a landscape where there are no heads divided from bodies hanging around in the air or anywhere, either new ones, from new atrocities or murders or terrorisms, or old ones, left over from new atrocities and murders and terrorisms and bequeathed to the future as if in old French revolution baskets...
Plaster cast of a 5th century BC Greek marble sculpture, Herbert F. Johnson Museum
The Pentax K-3 III Monochrome
Organist, Sage Chapel, Cornell University
Anyway, sometimes, all you want to do is walk around your town taking pictures, but it’s too damn cold, and the only things to shoot are either indoors, or gray, or both. I recently started using an unusual camera, a Pentax DSLR that shoots only in black and white. Yes, this is a real thing; there are only a few such camera models in existence, including one made by Leica, which I’ve always wanted to try but which costs, uh, nine thousand dollars, no lenses included. The Pentax one, a surprise release from the eccentric Japanese manufacturer, was rather easier to spring for (winter for?), and I already had the lenses, from my beloved LX film kit.
There are technical advantages to a monochrome-only sensor, including increased dynamic range, greater detail, and a lack of the digital aliasing that is a side effect of a normal camera’s color-interpreting filter layer. But really, none of this matters if you don’t spend your professional life creating and selling large-scale black-and-white photographic prints, which I do not. Instead, the camera appeals to me because it’s weird, obscure, and deliberately hobbled to satisfy a comically niche market. It’s a limiting exercise! And a fun one for winter, when the world already looks kind of monochrome. I disabled all noise reduction and have been shooting in the gloom, in order to enjoy the graininess the camera is giving me at high ISO. It’s a given that a middle-aged hobbyist photographer will compare everything to the black and white film of his youth, but yes, these photos do have some of that quality, and are about as free of unwanted computational effects as a digital camera can give you in 2025.
Above and below are a few snapshots taken in and around Ithaca and the Cornell campus over the past few weeks.
Sage Chapel, Cornell University
Balcony overlooking Ithaca, Herbert F. Johnson Museum
Fall Creek at Flatrocks, Ithaca
