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A Day In Black And White
Sunday’s snowstorm turned the world into art
Last Sunday in New York City and throughout much of the northeast, snowfall stripped the color away. It had snowed long and hard just a week earlier but something about the texture of this storm made it uncommonly beautiful, maybe so beautiful that it knew color would only get in its way. The sky was gray and everything else was a subtle shade of that same gray. The buildings, the cars, the people, the animals; they looked like carved sculptures, marble against marble, only the red brick retained enough pigment to penetrate the haze. The photographs you’re seeing here are regular color photographs I took with my phone. Thanks to some combination of the angle of the sun, the clutch of the temperature, and the magical texture of the snow, which was beyond powdery and something more like cottony, color simply evaporated on Sunday.
I loved it. Who didn’t? If you don’t happen to live in this region, your social media was surely teeming with gleeful visual documentation from your friends who do. As I looked out my window, it occurred to me that my younger self would have loved the view outside to the point of delirium. When I was a teenager and young adult, I wanted my life to be a black and white movie. Ideally, a modern art film: a Bergman, a Godard, a Fellini. A “black and white on purpose movie,” I would have said back then, only…
