Jennifer L. Roberts
Every year, around Thanksgiving, the nighttime temperatures begin to drop below freezing in Massachusetts. Ice season begins. With every passing year it seems more precarious and I am all the more thankful for it. Maybe it’s because I grew up in California (where it snowed only that one time in 1976), but I’m amazed by the generosity of ice. It just forms. Along the path. On top of the pond. For free! Icegiving.
For the past six years, I have been studying the ice with a small, inexpensive macro lens, with 10x magnification, that attaches to my phone. The lens has an extremely narrow focal plane, so that only a thin sliver of the ice is in focus in any given composition. The rest warps into various species of blur and flare. The lens must be held perfectly still about 10-25 mm from the surface (which means that I, too, have to slow down and freeze). The ice becomes an intimate, immersive medium rather than a discrete object.
Sometimes I gather ice from the wild: the forest, the driveway, the patio furniture. Sometimes I simply fill plastic takeout containers with an inch or so of water and let them freeze outside overnight. Each resulting disc or block is different, depending on the depth and rate of the temperature drop, the number of times it melts and refreezes before I get to it, whether it snows on the surface and what falls into it from the trees above.
The optics of the ice tangle with the optics of the camera. Every bubble and bend in the ice has its own lensing properties. Every miniscule shift in the angle of the camera or the depth of the focal plane or the quality of the light generates a different stochastic world. The ice slowly melts from the heat of my hand as I hold it up to my phone, gradually softening the optics. Water and glass, light and heat: in every image, the lens and the ice and the light are locked so tightly together that it becomes impossible to separate them.
The fine structure of any given piece of ice is ineffable. Sometimes only the light knows how to read it.
A disc of ice with an undulating surface, cast in a plastic container. I hold it up to the low winter sun at an oblique angle.
Late January sunset, around 4:30 in the afternoon, seen through a fragile skin of ice. It’s about a millimeter thick, with a few tiny bubbles in the pane.
A partially frozen container of water. When I pour out the liquid, a lattice of icy struts that had begun to form at the surface hover in the air about an inch above a rougher core of ice below. The struts interfere with the camera’s focus. Sunset.
The structure of slush. I bring a piece of frozen snow inside and run it for one second under cool water at the sink. I hold it up to the window under the kitchen fluorescents.
When it’s dark outside, I hold the ice in front of a table lamp. The incidents in the ice now appear in silhouette, with a sepia tone imparted by the lampshade. A touch of dish soap is added to the water before freezing.
An inch-thick sheet of ice broken into shards with a hammer.
Sometimes I get too close, and the lens accidentally touches the surface. The lens frame, warm from the heat of the phone, instantly melts an arc-shaped divot into the ice.
A pond at sunset photographed through a sheet of ice pulled from its own surface.
I bring a thick block of ice inside and run it under hot water for a few seconds. There is a sudden loud snap as the ice fractures under the thermal stress, but it stays together. The inside of the block is now a vaulted network of internal cracks with feather-sharp edges.
Last snow of the spring.
There is always a final heap of hardened snow on the north side of the house in April. It’s melted and refrozen a dozen times, and it’s full of dirt and gravel and squirrel hair.
