A Word on the Weather: Paula McCartney’s On Thin Ice, In A Blizzard.
By Andy Sturdevant
It’s difficult to talk about cold weather in a place like Minnesota in a way that feels authentic to the immediate way in which you actually experience cold weather. Talking about cold weather is so deeply ingrained in the region’s identity that any language you might use to describe the way it feels – “arctic blasts,” “bone-chilling winds,” “sub-zero temperatures” – just seems like a rote recitation of meteorological clichés. These are just things weather people on TV say. These are phrases that have almost lost their meaning through repetition – when you’re talking about how cold it is outside today with your co-workers or friends or the other people at your bus stop, you’re reciting a little meteorological liturgy. The lines have been written long ago, and you’re simply repeating them almost verbatim, without focusing a lot of thought on what they mean. That’s because you’ve repeated them so many times, you almost forget what they really do mean. “Cold front coming down from Canada. Looks like snow. Supposed to about five inches. It’s going to be a cold one. Why do we live here again? Ha ha!” And…amen.
This isn’t an awful thing, necessarily. There’s something comforting in sticking to this script. It fosters a sense of community and shared experience. No matter how cold it gets, the basic language remains the same. It normalizes the experience for all involved.
But this cold weather script does really belie how bizarre the weather in this part of the world can seem, especially to transplants and outsiders and others coming from more temperate climates. I recall my first winter in Minneapolis, after spending my entire life in the Mid-South; in particular, I remember the first time I experienced one of those “Arctic blasts” you hear so much about from TV weather personalities.
There was nothing rote about it.
It felt like being physically assaulted by an alien force, by a gust of air that had somehow traveled at blinding speeds, over thousands and thousands of miles; air that had traveled from another world completely unlike the one I knew, and penetrated that world totally. It didn’t even feel like air in the sense that I knew air. “Alien” was the only word I could think of to describe the experience.
Perhaps it takes an outsider to appreciate how alien the everyday experiences of cold weather can seem.
Appropriate, then, that the title of the book wraps this menace in the relative warmth of two classic cold weather clichés. It’s a clever hat tip to the hackneyed language that we use to talk about the weather, and once inside the pages of the book, McCartney subverts it entirely.
The photograms inside wordlessly capture the strange, monochromatic world of swirling snow and slowly forming sheets of ice. There is a sense of awe at the alien quality of the world in midwinter, a sense that captures that unreal feeling of stepping, for the first time, into a below-zero landscape in the darkest stretches of December.
If it seems unreal, that’s because, in some sense, it is. McCartney’s photograms were constructed entirely in the dark room, using not much other than light and water. The blackness of the open spaces in her images – and the swirling points of white that seem to be snow – echoes the natural world, but it doesn’t reflect the precise visual language of it. These are not “landscapes” in the understood sense; there is no sign of humanity. It’s all blizzards and thin ice in their purest, most elemental forms. The micro and the macro are totally eliminated, as well. The images alternate between gusts of snowy white specks, and plates of ice, cracking and breaking down into ever-smaller pieces. These images could be vast swaths of northern Minnesota lake land as seen from satellite, or small instances of condensation glimpsed from a kitchen window.
It seems at first like this exercise may be McCartney’s way of exerting control over powerful natural forces; of bringing these phenomena inside the comfort of the studio, where they can be controlled and mediated. This is a common response to the obliterating harshness of a Midwestern winter – a sort of denial. A cultivation of the idea that overcoming the cold is nothing more than a simple act of willpower, and that by simply willing away the elements, one can just get through it. I recall adopting this attitude in my earliest days in Minnesota, and I see it a lot in others recently arriving in this climate. It’s difficult to not read some autobiography into this on McCartney’s part. Perhaps confronting the elements from the safety of the darkroom is her way of navigating the experience, a denial of the power that winter holds over anyone that’s chosen to live here.
Tempting to think, I suppose, but I don’t think that’s quite what’s going on here, exactly. It’s much too simple a reading of a complex and beautiful suite of images. First of all, the darkroom is not a particularly safe place, as anyone with photographic experience knows. The process of printing photographs – of which the photogram is simply the most basic distillation – can be as arbitrary and capricious as any winter storm. Any number of factors, from environmental to human error, can alter or ruin the most carefully laid darkroom plans. Thin ice, indeed.
Mostly, though, I see the images in this book as a way of answering the question of how one can confront the great fact of life in this part of the country – the weather – without falling back onto a backlog of carefully honed clichés, whether those clichés are linguistic or visual. Icy breath, arboreal trees, animal footprints, the smallness of a figure against a snowy landscape, all the regular signifiers of man vs. nature – McCartney has stripped all of these away completely. What we’re left with is a pure and (quite literally) elemental expression of the world in wintertime. It isn’t a confrontation so much as a reflection back of the purest experience of being caught in the so-called “arctic blast” the weatherman on the radio promised you that morning, and momentarily being so overwhelmed by the vastness of it that you temporarily lost the ability to verbally express that feeling.
All images from Paula McCartney’s On Thin Ice, In A Blizzard.
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