Vintage photographs of snowflakes taken by the first person to capture them with a camera went on sale on Thursday at an antiques fair in New York.
The pictures are just a fraction of a lifetime’s work comprising thousands of spectacular images taken by the self-taught photographer and Vermont farmer Wilson Bentley at the end of the 19th century.
Ten of Bentley’s snowflake images are up for sale at US$4,800 each at the American Antiques Show. They appear alongside other work by the photographer of winter landscapes.
“They’re remarkably beautiful,” said Carl Hammer, whose Chicago art gallery is selling the images. “There are imperfections on the outer edges of the image itself and on the paper, but the images themselves are quite spectacular.”
Bentley’s obsession with snow crystals began when he received a microscope for his 15th birthday. He became spellbound by their beauty, complexity and endless variety.
He told a magazine in 1925: “Under the microscope, I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty and it seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others. Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and no one design was ever repeated. When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost. Just that much beauty was gone, without leaving any record behind.”
Bentley started trying to draw the flakes, but the snow melted before he could finish. His parents eventually bought him a camera and he spent two years trying to capture images of the tiny, fleeting crystals.
He caught falling snowflakes by standing in the doorway with a wooden tray as snowstorms passed over. The tray was painted black so he could see the crystals and delicately transfer them on to a glass slide.
To study the crystals, Bentley rigged his bellows camera up to the microscope, but found he could not reach the controls to bring them into focus. He overcame the problem through the imaginative use of wheels and cord.
Bentley took his first successful photomicrograph of a snow crystal at the age of 19 and went on to capture more than 5,000 additional images.
Kenneth Libbrecht, a physics professor who grows ice crystals in his lab at the California Institute of Technology, said the photographs were so good that “hardly anybody bothered to photograph snowflakes for almost 100 years.”
Stacy Hollander, senior curator of the American Folk Art Museum, which is hosting the fair, said: “Everyone’s fascinated by snow. It’s just magical and he captured that magic in these beautiful photomicrographs.”
In his local town of Jericho, Bentley was nicknamed “Snowflake Bentley.” A museum there is dedicated to his life’s work, housing 2,000 of his vintage prints. A book of his photographs, Snow Crystals, was published in 1931, the year he died after walking home in a blizzard.
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