Winter gives a glimpse into the earliest traces of winter, the height of the snow season, and the melt-time within the western Great Basin region. Devoid of people and interiors, Winter provides seemingly calm and quiet photographs of the reality of winter on a modern day frontier.
Introduction by Bruce Haley
Often in winter I think of those questions that came to Job from the whirlwind:
From whose womb does the ice come forth, and who has given birth to the frost of heaven when the waters become hard as stone, when the surface of the deep is frozen?
In my mind’s eye it is all Blakean imagery and thunderous voice, trailing in its wake a near echo from Christina Rossetti: “Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.”
My ideal world is a perpetual cycle of autumn and winter, burnished gold followed by a canvas of white, over and over.
This book represents my fascination with the arc of winter, and the wild variations of ice and snow found among both the man-altered landscapes and the untouched places of the region that I call home.
In the opening image it is October along Dismal Creek, and in the golden grasses may be seen the scattered remnants of an early but quickly disappearing snow. Before long this entire area will be buried in white for month after month.
In the final image it is April on the edge of Massacre Rim, looking westward across Long Valley and over the Hays Canyon Range, with snow’s last redoubt in the far distance of the Warner Mountains.
Between those two images is a twisting pathway through the heart of my winter, into the stillness of a dormant world.
Bruce Haley
Bruce Haley is a recipient of the Robert Capa Gold Medal, and his work has been published and exhibited internationally for over thirty years.
