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Snowfall, the way it lies there,
Does nothing but changes everything.
-From A Walk in the Snow by Jo Shapcott
"Snow Pictures" presents an ongoing visual exploration into the transformative quality of snow upon a landscape. For me, snow is both a remembering and a forgetting of place. The fundamental contours and shape of an environment are revealed under snow, just as their details are simultaneously obscured. Snow is a weather of simplicity and yet it bears rich human association, representative of temporary escape from the everyday in places it falls rarely, or of enduring hardship where it covers the ground year round. It is against the canvas of snow that human impact upon the environment is so often amplified to reveal with new clarity what is always there: the smudging of exhaust fumes, the brightness of litter, the interlacing tracks of a car’s tires.
And now the snow had perfected their isolation. If the silence,
the absence of their situation could have been made corporeal,
it would have looked like this. A thick shroud over the fields,
the farms, the river. A great white dust sheet laid over
the entire contents of a locked and abandoned house.
-From Resistance by Owen Sheers
It is not just the visual qualities of snow landscapes that fascinate me, but also the aural. A fall of snow brings a silencing, a sense of stillness which I attempt to capture in my images; that moment when a landscape is happened upon in its shrouded state, loaded with the promise of what remains unseen beneath the drifts and waves of white.
The girls and boys in winter know
That love is like the drifting snow;
It praises everything although
Its perishable breath must go.
-From Lesson by Anne Stevenson
It is at these moments I find a personal sense of peace, as if snow has made a cathedral of the world about me, a brief ethereal refuge from the concerns of life. This is why I seek out snow covered landscapes and why I try to compose images in which these qualities are captured; a stillness within a stillness which I hope will transport a viewer in the same way the original landscape transported me.