WILSON A. BENTLEY (1865-1931): VINTAGE PHOTOMICROGRAPHS will begin Tuesday, September 23rd, and continuing through Saturday, November 8th, 2008.

WILSON A. BENTLEY (1865-1931): VINTAGE PHOTOMICROGRAPHS will consist of about fifteen vintage photomicrographs of snowflakes, frost, and dew, as well as photographs of cloud studies, taken by Wilson A. Bentley, better known as “Snowflake” Bentley.

WILSON A. BENTLEY coined the phrase “No two snowflakes are alike.” He grew up in Jericho, Vermont, and developed a life-long fascination for snow. His parents bought him a camera with a microscope attached with which he discovered how to photograph snowflakes. The process was difficult, made more so by the temporary nature of the subject – many snowflakes melted before BENTLEY could capture their images on film, making the photographs extremely rare.

BENTLEY was the subject of a Caldecott Medal-winning book, Snowflake Bentley, by Jacqueline Briggs Martin (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998), and a biography by Duncan C. Blanchard, The Snowflake Man: A Biography of Wilson A. Bentley (McDonald & Woodward Publishing Company, 1998). BENTLEY himself published numerous articles about his work in magazines such as National Geographic, Harper’s Monthly, Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and The New York Times Magazine, as well as a book, Snow Crystals, later republished as Snowflakes in Photographs (Dover Publications, 2000).