It’s a common feeling: Michigan winter sucks. Christmas provides a brief respite, something to look forward to, but January hits like a lead weight. Spring and sunshine feel impossibly far away.
Stop! Wrong. Don’t spiral. Winter is beautiful—choosing to embrace it is key.
In the doldrums of one Michigan winter, I leaned into it. I went to the beach, which was covered in snow and ice, with my Polaroid camera, intent on taking some simple landscape photos.
I walked the beach in the freezing wind, my hands numb even in my gloves. My face stung with the harsh, cold air blowing in off Lake Michigan. Walking alone, pausing, composing, making photographs. Simple studies, snow drifts, ice, the sun, the lake. Observing, reflecting, contemplating. In my element.
The beauty of the Polaroid lies in its physicality. You press the shutter and an object emerges from the camera. Each one is a little slip case with a transparent window into a thin pouch filled with viscous chemistry. The chemicals mix together when the steel rollers pop the chemistry pouches as the photo emerges, forcing the developer onto the photograph, reacting with the light-sensitive silver emulsion to make the image. The light is thus recorded and processed immediately—but not instantly. The chemistry takes several minutes to process the image into something visible.
Like any chemical reaction, temperature can alter the process. In this case, the freezing temperatures chilled and slowed the development. The physical environment altered the image directly, beyond just the lens-based composition. The photographs took on a blue-green hue, literally “colder” in photographic terms, and cracked with ice crystals around the corners. Photos of ice and snow, frozen like their subjects.
I had a hunch this might happen to the photographs, but the experiment proved more successful than I imagined. I didn’t anticipate how fully the cold would reflect the conditions of their making. I didn’t even see them until I returned home, taking off my coat and pulling the stack from the pocket. Delayed gratification, another beauty of analog photographs, film and otherwise, lost in the digital age.
I wanted to understand the beauty of winter and embrace it, make something from it. Success, for me, meant remembering this work and reflecting on it, thinking of these images whenever winter had me down.
The snow on the beach, that strange white light as the sun reflected off it. The ice glimmering and shining. Winter is stark, but that starkness is beautiful, its crystalline clarity mirroring the snow itself. Everything is unveiled in winter, stripped bare.
Bobby Mars is an artist, alter ego, and former art professor. Follow him on X @bobby_on_mars.
