Snowplace Over No Place ❄️
Reflections on an Altered Landscape
The first snowfall every year inevitably brings to mind snow’s unifying and transcendental impacts on places, altering perceptions of landscapes we know well or those we are learning to see.
It’s the first week of winter storms in Northern New Mexico. I can already recognize what J.B. Jackson wrote in The Essential Landscape (1983) about “the virtue and even the beauty of this time of year [here]: it isolates and intensifies existence, it creates a landscape and then preserves it by freezing it.”
Inspired by themes from photographers who exhibited at CENTER Santa Fe’s annual Portfolio Walk and Book Fair over the weekend, I spent yesterday photographing in-place with my Leica M11 in Tesuque, using black and white settings, and observing how particular vantage points changed as the snow continued.
By association, I remembered doing this before in other places, mindful of James Joyce’s words from “The Dead” in Dubliners, which famously describe how snow might unify, calm disparities and discord, symbolizing the commonalities of places and states of being:
Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves… It was falling too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill…
Yesterday’s snowfall evoked a romantic narrative about the multifaceted harmony—and contrasts—between nature and human settlement.
The first snowfall grants the liberty of nostalgia and tranquility, including permission to stay home and observe the simple and familiar turn into something evocative and inspiring.
Perfect
lovely