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.
Thai police yesterday said that they arrested a senior Buddhist monk on suspicion of embezzling US$2.8 million intended for his monastery, alongside a suspected female accomplice he was having sex with. The case is the latest scandal to hit the clergy in Buddhist-majority Thailand after a sex and extortion case involving senior monks last year prompted public outrage and calls for greater scrutiny of temple finances. Phra Wachirayan Wi, the 66-year-old abbot of the 14th-century Wat Phutthaisawan in the ancient capital of Ayutthaya, was arrested on Thursday on charges including embezzlement and money laundering, lead police investigator Pattanasak Bupphasuwan said. A 47-year-old woman
SECRET FOOTAGE: A 17-year-old girl told British broadcaster Channel 4 that she had been approached by a man who covertly recorded her and their interaction Calls are growing louder in Europe for action against “pervert” smart glasses after secretly filmed footage of girls and women appeared online — with a petition in Britain demanding a ban on their sale. Anyone wearing smart glasses can take photos, film videos, listen to music, make phone calls, translate text or interact with an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant, with sales now hitting millions. The devices grabbed attention this summer after a marketing tie-up between Kylie Jenner, beauty mogul and member of the Kardashian dynasty, and tech giant Meta. Since smartphones are now embedded in daily life, “big tech” is
FROSTY RECEPTION: ‘I conveyed the strong view of the Irish people that the normalization of war and genocide can never be accepted,’ the Irish president said US President Donald Trump on Saturday said that he would “love to see” a united Ireland, wading into a politically sensitive subject as he embarked on a two-day Irish visit that blurs the lines between his presidency and personal business interests. After meeting Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin in Dublin, Trump said reunification of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland — split for more than a century — would be “a fantastic thing.” “It’s going to happen eventually. It may as well happen now,” he told reporters, adding that “the UK will have something to say about it, obviously.”
North Korea yesterday fired multiple ballistic missiles, Seoul said, a day after South Korea concluded five days of joint maritime drills with the US and Japan that were focused on the North. Pyongyang last month slammed plans for the so-called Freedom Edge joint exercises in international waters off South Korea as a “threat” to North Korea and other countries of the region. Yesterday, Seoul’s military detected “multiple short-range ballistic missiles launched from the Wonsan area toward the East Sea [the Sea of Japan],” the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement. The missiles were detected at about
RSS