After several very fruitful days photographing tiny parts of ice puddles in rural Kakheti (outside my wife’s home village), having returned to Tbilisi, I waited patiently here too for more ice, i.e. cold enough temperatures for the local puddles to freeze.
And, for a day or two, conditions were ideal in our neighborhood. Rejoicing, out I went to meet the ice with only my macro lens. Images abounded, including plenty of things which I interpreted as other things. I’m always looking for the kind of image which will prompt a viewer to ask, “What even IS that [made of]?” These were many. But the rarer kind, for me, are those which I shoot out of interest and only afterwards realize what I have, on my laptop screen in post-processing.
One such image I have called Ellen Ripley’s Nightmare, after the heroine of the earlier Alien films, played by Sigourney Weaver. It is a close-up of one of the Alien monsters, also called xenomorphs, against which Ripley is pitted in the films. Astoundingly to me, several square inches of ice have yielded this little terror, complete with fractal detail and some areas out of focus behind the sharp surface plane. I could blow it up to wall-size, the resolution is great enough; but my wife would not thank me, even though she hasn’t seen more than a few clips of the films. It’s pretty amazingly disturbing. For some, but not for everyone.
I also found myself noticing and shooting frozen MUD for the first time, marveling in its own unique colors and textures. There is as much to discover here as there is in clear, nearly colorless ice. Certainly a departure for me.
Then the Big Snow came, and suddenly the whole city and its surroundings were buried in it for a few days. Ice became ubiquitous, far too much to deal with, vast. I didn’t find much to inspire in these conditions. But another image, from a tiny patch of ice on stone stairs in the Old City, I have called She Looks Up. But it might also be called Storm Trooper’s Helmet X-ray… It’s less disturbing than the ice alien, but still quite strange. Growing on me. One of her eyes is clearly visible, the other less so but still just about. There is no clear sense of scale here, as with the Nightmare image, another characteristic which pleases me greatly. Tiny or huge? Millimeters or miles? They could be either.
Now I’m waiting for the snow here to melt or sublimate into the air, as temperatures warm up. A freeze after this will restore what I am looking for. Before then, though, I will make a short trip back up to our village in Svaneti. Lamproba is coming on February 1, when we men carry burning birch torches to bonfire locations before sunrise, pray for every family in our village, and then have big feasts. I try not to miss this, and have been or gone there for it for many years now, even during our winters away in Tbilisi. It will likely yield wonderful images, but the time reconnecting with both my neighbors and with proper Winter are the main things for me. I’m taking up a Georgian friend for his first taste of this Svan holiday.
One thing I have realized about myself is that I have boundless curiosity. The finding of concrete forms in nature’s abstractions like ice gives an outlet for this curiosity, with delight the result. This is very satisfying. And, not meaning to sound selfish, while I do greatly appreciate it when others like my work too, this is secondary to me. I know what I like!
If you are blessed with the kind of vision which I have, to even notice the world in this way, be glad, even if sometimes what you see is disquieting or worse. In my experience, such images are the small minority in a sea of the beautiful, fantastic and glorious. As I hope to demonstrate with my ongoing Coffee + Chaos exhibition at Corner House Coffee in Tbilisi, anyone with a smartphone/camera, AND the desire to slow down and notice, can shoot amazing images. And if you don’t see like this, come in, let me do the seeing and the showing for you. The world is stranger and more wonderful than we might imagine. Enjoy.
Blog by Tony Hanmer
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer and photographer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri: www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
