William Alwyn Bentley spent four decades around the turn of the century — the last century — photographing snowflakes. He worked in snowstorms, collecting flakes on a blackboard and then carefully transferring them to microscope slides with a splinter of wood, holding his breath while photographing so as not to melt the flake. Largely self-taught, Bentley is the one who first said that no two snowflakes are alike. His photographic plates are now owned by the Buffalo Museum of Science, which has put 154 of them online. Beautiful, sublime images–and surprisingly, many do not look like the classic “snowflake” pattern (aka “dendritic crystals” in Bentley’s language).
