SMITTEN BY WINTER'S CHILLY CHARM, PHOTOGRAPHER BILL WESTMORELAND FINDS JOY IN NATURE'S SCULPTING WITH SNOW AND THE SEASON'S DRAMATIC LIGHT

photos by Bill Westmoreland, text by Edward M. Gómez

Baby, it’s cold outside — cold enough to make our fingers freeze when exposing them to push the picture-snapping button on a camera. Yes, some of us do whine. Better to toughen up, bundle up, and bear it — right?

“How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand one who’s cold?” the Russian novelist and Soviet-era dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) once observed. Having been imprisoned in the Gulag, in the far reaches of Kazakhstan, by Joseph Stalin for criticizing the Soviet dictator in a private letter, Solzhenitsyn knew a thing or two about the cold — about cold hearts, cold temperatures, and the life-or-death vicissitudes of the Cold War.