alleverythingthatisyou sno6_005.1 Online

alleverythingthatisyou sno6_005.1
“For the Starns, the six-sided nature of snow crystals appears less important than the ways in which the flakes hover between one state and another. As they are being photographed, they are in a process of alteration from solid to liquid, from organized form in space to aqueous blob on a surface, and thus suggest a transitiveness that photography, as a medium devoted to stilling the moment, would seem to contradict. Similarly, as was true of the pictures of leaf veins and tree branches, light seems not so much to shine on the snowflakes as it shines through them. Instead of appearing as specimens, in the manner of 19th-century scientific observation, the snowflakes are objects of transformation. Few of the Starns’ snowflakes are models of perfection, and in this they remind one of finding starfish and seashells scoured by the tides and left to dry on sandy beaches. Many have parts missing, or they have all their detailed armatures on one side but not the other. Here again, the Starns’ images exceed the aesthetic register of the catalog. Unlike industrial structures, or manmade devices, imperfection is an essential part of their beauty and poignancy. Here is material evidence of the Starns’ interest in the phenomenological character of the natural world, cast into being against the certitude of our own impermanence. The photographs speak of the fragile delicacy of our ever-warming world while being themselves a visual bulwark against despair, and they draw us, like moths to light, to the pleasures of sight that but for the camera would exceed the human eye.” Excerpt from Andy Grundberg’s introduction in alleverythingthatisyou (catalogue published by the Wetterling Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden 2007)