Snow fills the frame edge to edge: a wall of glacier across the top, split by dark crevasses and overhangs, and beneath it an unbroken sweep of drift sculpted into long shadowed curves. Sky occupies a strip of hard blue at the very top. In the lower right corner, small enough to be missed, a figure walks across the field in a long silver-grey coat with a fur-trimmed hem and a raised hood. There are no tracks behind her.
The proportion is the argument. A garment is the reason this photograph exists, and the photograph has been built so that the garment occupies perhaps a fortieth of its surface, dwarfed by a landscape indifferent to it. The strategy is old and reliable: grandeur is borrowed from the place and paid out to the object. What the sublime is being asked to do here is sell.
That ought to be easy to condemn, and it is not, quite. The picture is beautiful and its beauty is not a trick; the light on that snow is real light on real ice, and the person is genuinely out there, cold, walking. But a landscape entered in order to be photographed becomes scenery, and scenery is a form of consumption — the ice reduced to backdrop by the same appetite that will, in time, reduce the ice by other means. The image is far more knowing about the coat than about the glacier, and it is the glacier that will not be reprinted.
Snow fills the frame edge to edge: a wall of glacier across the top, split by dark crevasses and overhangs, and beneath it an unbroken sweep of drift sculpted into long shadowed curves. Sky occupies a strip of hard blue at the very top. In the lower right corner, small enough to be missed, a figure walks across the field in a long silver-grey coat with a fur-trimmed hem and a raised hood. There are no tracks behind her.
The proportion is the argument. A garment is the reason this photograph exists, and the photograph has been built so that the garment occupies perhaps a fortieth of its surface, dwarfed by a landscape indifferent to it. The strategy is old and reliable: grandeur is borrowed from the place and paid out to the object. What the sublime is being asked to do here is sell.
That ought to be easy to condemn, and it is not, quite. The picture is beautiful and its beauty is not a trick; the light on that snow is real light on real ice, and the person is genuinely out there, cold, walking. But a landscape entered in order to be photographed becomes scenery, and scenery is a form of consumption — the ice reduced to backdrop by the same appetite that will, in time, reduce the ice by other means. The image is far more knowing about the coat than about the glacier, and it is the glacier that will not be reprinted.