Frost, Focus, and the Art of Disappearing Beauty
Elizabeth Root Blackmer doesn’t shoot frost. She translates it. At an hour when most of us are face-down in a pillow and halfway through a dream about missing our Uber, she’s already got her lens pressed to a farmhouse window, chasing micro-miracles before they vanish with the sun. These aren’t your run-of-the-mill "pretty ice on glass" snaps. Her Frost Crystals series feels like a cosmic whisper in fern-formation: delicate, mathematical, and as fleeting as a good idea in the shower.
What drew her in? “I loved the fernlike shapes of the crystal formations,” she says. “They seemed to cross the boundary between the inorganic and the organic worlds into the universal.” Naturally. Who among us hasn’t looked at a pane of frost and pondered the nature of existence? But while we’re scrambling for the demister, Elizabeth is out here conducting metaphysical seances through her camera lens.
She calls the dawn shoots “a ritual,” and you believe her. Not because she’s burning incense or chanting in the snow, but because “with only the time before they melt to capture them, the ritual of shooting takes on an intensity of purpose.” It’s high-stakes serenity. Spiritual speed dating. A golden-hour meditation with entropy as your timer.
Her frost photos gaslight your eyeballs in the best way. Are you looking at a postage stamp or a satellite scan from deep space? A chilly windowpane or a glacial rave flier made by nature itself? Exactly. That liminal, icy ambiguity is the whole trick. “Ambiguity of scale is a key and valued element in my work,” Elizabeth says. “Some mystery is needed about what we are seeing.” The frost flirts with perception, plays dress-up with light, and disappears before you can ask follow-up questions. It's not about answers. It’s about the thrill of not quite knowing what you’re looking at.
The poetry of her process lies in attention - obsessive, devotional, caffeine-optional attention. “There is plenty to photograph everywhere,” she insists. “I just need to look with great attention. All the time.” It’s less about documenting and more about decoding. She sees the universe’s quiet backstage, while the rest of us are stuck in the noisy lobby looking for Wi-Fi.
She doesn’t capture frost to preserve it. She celebrates its impermanence. “Things that don’t last may remind us of our own ephemeral nature,” she says, “and urge us to live accordingly.” That’s not just a poetic line; it’s a worldview. And one that glitters briefly before melting off the windowsill.
Colour matters, but not in a “crank the vibrance and hope for the best” way. “The main thing I did was increase the saturation of the colours that were already there,” she explains. The magic was always in the glass. She just coaxed it into frame. She plays, yes. But only after throwing out every rulebook not written by frost.
And then there’s Len Gittleman, the grunting oracle of abstraction who taught Elizabeth that a well-timed silence can speak louder than a critique. A disciple of Aaron Siskind, Gittleman passed down the gospel of ambiguity with a side of minimal feedback: a grunt here, a photo swap there, and eventually, a teaching assistantship that iced the deal. That lineage runs deep. You can feel it in her work: images that aren’t just beautiful, but porous, untethered, and sneakily unforgettable. They linger like déjà vu you can’t trace. Like the frost itself, they’re here, then they’re not. But they leave a shimmer behind.