winter wonder

It's amazing to me that falling from the sky, whipping in the wind, laying gently on the ground, each snowflake looks like a perfectly clear and delicate piece of crystal. It's really hard to imagine that's what's melting on my face, stinging my eyes or clinging to my hair like dandruff. And then they melt, turn to mush, get black and disgusting from passing cars and a thousand Gore-tex boots.

I'm not prone to musing on winter or snow, but I suppose a February in Boston after nearly four years in southern California makes it easier to marvel at the seasons the rest of the country takes for granted. When I was back in San Francisco over the holidays, we checked out an exhibit on early photography at SFMOMA (Brought to Light). It was several rooms of black and white photos from the nineteenth century...early microscopic captures of plant and animal life, documents of planets, lightning, the first x-rays.



For me, it was an experience in imagined memory, in which I could picture how revelatory it was to be able to see bones, the shape of electricity, the motion of the human body, a perfect crystalline snowflake. It was also a reminder that sometimes the camera's authenticity is much more surreal than what the naked eye observes...and reconciling these two forms of vision can get tricky.