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.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS