Spindrift

The wind, which cannot be photographed, made visible by the snow it carries.

On Dovrefjell the wind does not stop; it only changes what it carries. In the last hour of the day it carries snow, and the whole plateau lifts a hand's height off the ground and moves. The hills behind the haze lose their edges. The drifts at my feet are carved and carved again while I watch.

A shrub cased in rime stands in the stream of it like a thing on fire. For a few minutes the low sun turns all of this gold, and then the light goes out of it and the wind keeps on in grey, pushing a long white wave across the plain.

I made these photographs in those few gold minutes and in the long grey hours that paid for them. The subject is not the snow. It is the wind, which cannot be photographed, and which is in every frame.