Lens: Blizzard blasts Massachusetts, Beacon photographer sets out to capture the imagery
February 7, 2022
I recently spoke with a fellow staff member of the Beacon during a long car ride. We discussed a future trip to his home country of Canada.
He explained he felt a creeping sense of impermanence when he would travel north to see icebergs and polar bears, something mutually evoked by the imagery I have only seen through the tame and sheltered mediums of a national geographic Instagram feed or YouTube videos. Both of us agreed, the thought of these natural anomalies and their potential to vanish heightened our focus on our climate crisis anxiety.
The current impermanence of these snowy beasts poses as a psychological soothsayer for the future of all the natural marvels of Earth.
A parking lot sits mostly vacant amid the storm.
A gas station is left inaccessible by snow.
Snow makes a road sign illegible.
Steps and side paths of a home are inundated by snow.
The light of a plowing pedestrian barely breaks through the darkness of a snowy street.
A dormant street receives a new layer of snow.
The aforementioned conversation returned to haunt me with the snowfall of the recent blizzard that swept through Massachusetts.
Perhaps it was my Californian predisposition, or perhaps it was anxiety brought on by the light panic shopping I had seen the evening before that chilled me.
No matter the cause, the storm reinforced the troubling impacts of a forever shifting climate.
Not wanting to expose my most expensive equipment to the conditions of snow, I grabbed my Polaroid camera. Polaroid film holds its own sense of impermanence. Its physicality is a reminder that it can be damaged or lost. Much like the blizzard itself and the other arctic wonders of the high north, it is only here while we have it.