The Four Seasons

Winter outnumbers every other season in the old pictures, and there is a good reason. Snow made the world look different. A street, a farm or a park that was ordinary in July turned into something worth photographing after a storm. Printmakers knew this too. Currier and Ives sold winter scenes by the thousands, with sleighs, skaters and snowy farmhouses, and they became some of the best-loved prints of the 1800s.

Winter also brought work that does not exist anymore. Before electric refrigeration, ice was cut from frozen ponds and rivers in big blocks, packed in sawdust and stored in icehouses for summer. Photographs of ice harvesting show men with saws and long poles working on the frozen surface. City pictures show streets clogged after big storms, like the Blizzard of 1888 that buried the Northeast in March. In Vermont, a farmer named Wilson Bentley photographed single snowflakes through a microscope, starting in 1885, and showed that no 2 looked alike.

Summer pictures are mostly about getting out of the heat. Beaches, lakes, porches, picnics, swimming holes and band concerts in the park. Fall pictures are about harvest and color. Farms bringing in pumpkins and corn, apple picking, and the trees of New England and the mountains turning red and gold.

The fall colors have a simple explanation. The yellow and orange are in the leaves all summer, hidden by green chlorophyll. When the days shorten and the trees stop making chlorophyll, the green fades and the other colors show through. The reds are different. Some trees make new red pigment in the fall, and bright sunny days and cool nights bring out the strongest color.

Most of the old photographs here are black and white, so the fall foliage has to be imagined. Look instead at the shapes, the bare branches against the sky, the drifts of leaves along a road. Hand-colored prints and early color processes like the photochrom tried to show what the camera could not.