My initial reaction to [Lisa M. Robinson]’s series of pictures in the snow was one of ambivalence. Perhaps it is of little surprise that the image that seized my attention was one of orange construction netting — construction imagery gets me every time. As [New England winter] has dumped the white stuff upon us these past few weeks (and months), I can’t help recalling Robinson’s work on a near daily basis.

It is significant, I think, that photographing the snow is one of the great Photo 101 challenges — light metering the gleaming landscape in a manner as to render it accurately, and not in muddied grays, is a dull (but useful) common assignment. It is truly a challenge to both photograph in the uncomfortable cold while adjusting for the dominant, detail-less white. But I guess this is what left me ambivalent for so long; the series can be viewed simply as an excercise, as cool, empty, and impersonal studies or camera tests.

The blank heaps of passionless snow may serve as a barrier, a homogenizer, but alternatively, they can be viewed as outlines — a fat highlighter moving along the landscape. Snow, in photographic reproduction as well as in life, becomes the great natural decontextualizer, painting out the background, making the sky and foreground uniform and flat. The world is limited to dark and occasionally colored shapes and the peculiar subtleties of that which the snow cannot bury completely — structures, living things, black simmering water on the pond — brought into crisp focus and thoughtful scrutiny.

[The New Yorker] wrote a while back on Robinson’s work: “For the past five winters, Robinson photographed landscapes from Colorado to New York so enveloped in snow that they appear almost blank. Her pictures zero in on what remains when the world turns white: a lakeside picnic table in its own snug furrow; a plot, outlined by black poles and yellow rope, crisscrossed by the tracks of solitary travellers. The patched-together wooden shack of an ice fisherman is fragile and forlorn in one image, but, seen from a distance alongside a scattering of similar shelters, it becomes part of a colorful toy village of Monopoly houses seen through a scrim of falling snow.“