WILSON A. BENTLEY: VINTAGE PHOTOMICROGRAPHS
NOVEMBER 25 - DECEMBER 22, 2006
WILSON A. BENTLEY: VINTAGE PHOTOMICROGRAPHS will begin Saturday, November 25th, and continue through Friday, December 22rd, 2006.
WILSON A. BENTLEY (1865-1931): VINTAGE PHOTOMICROGRAPHS will consist of about twenty vintage photographs of snowflakes, taken by Wilson A. Bentley, better known as “Snowflake” Bentley.
WILSON A. BENTLEY coined the phrase “No two snowflakes are alike.” He grew up in Jericho, Vermont, and developed a life-long fascination for snow. His parents bought him a camera with a microscope attached with which he discovered how to photograph snowflakes. The process was difficult, made more so by the temporary nature of the subject – many snowflakes melted before BENTLEY could capture their images on film, making the photographs extremely rare.
BENTLEY was the subject of a Caldecott Medal-winning book, Snowflake Bentley, by Jacqueline Briggs Martin (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998), and a biography by Duncan C. Blanchard, The Snowflake Man: A Biography of Wilson A. Bentley (McDonald & Woodward Publishing Company, 1998). BENTLEY himself published numerous articles about his work in magazines such as National Geographic, Harper’s Monthly, Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and The New York Times Magazine, as well as a book, Snow Crystals, later republished as Snowflakes in Photographs (Dover Publications, 2000).
Snowflake
Vintage photomicrograph on printing out paper with gold chloride toning from glass plate negative, 2 15/16 x 3 9/16 inches
DAVIS & LANGDALE COMPANY, INC.
NEW YORK, NY 10021
212-838-0333