![]() Other images provide the reverse, dwelling on girls watching snowball fights from bus windows and winter vistas edged by thin, frilled curtains. In Ferdinando Scianna’s observations of a New York bar on a winter’s evening, captured from the street outside, the neon signs and stacked bottles are partly blurred by the condensation running down the glass. In Jean Gaumy’s photos taken on polar yacht Le Vagabond, the icy blue Arctic surrounds a small, saturated square of light: the yacht’s inhabitants pictured safe and warm in the heart of an inhospitable environment. Whether the camera is on outside looking in or the inside looking out, we as viewers are given a kind of precious double vision. A natural friend to the photographer – what better than a frame within a frame? – Magnum’s archives yield a number of images that allow for simultaneity of place. It is the window that perhaps proves the best portal for winter’s many contrasts. Rowdy images of punters in pubs socialising or singing evoke the muggy heat of windows steamed up by body heat and trapped breath. Christmas dinners and tree decorating illustrate the conviviality of people drawn together with a common purpose when the days are at their shortest and darkest: united in celebrations marked by ritual, light, and lovingly prepared food. Others, however, yield the intimacies and comforts of a winter’s day kept at bay. Chris Steele-Perkins’ photo of a pensioner by a fire seems somehow colder as an image than any equivalent ones outdoors featuring roaring braziers or golden steam rising from street vendor’s stoves. Not that they are always automatically cosy. ![]() Photos of indoor life take on a particular hue in winter, set against the knowledge of the weather beyond the windows. In these photos one is reminded keenly of the sensation of being cold: the clothes it requires, the postures it provokes, the biting exhilaration and numb extremities it offers, the relief found in retreating afterwards to the welcome embrace of central heating or lit fires. Many images, too, dwell more fully on those out in the elements, whether the focus is on a delivery man hefting two hog carcasses over one shoulder in Chinatown while snow drifts down, yellow jacketed commuters on a chilly metro platform, Japanese families fishing for shimiji clams in minus eighteen degrees, or, as in Hiroji Kubota’s striking 1982 photo from Inner Mongolia, two young boys in warm coats, each perched on a magnificent camel decked out in its thick winter fur. Others, as explored above, let the photograph’s inhabitants remain as silhouettes, or hint at humans tucked away elsewhere: their presence indicated in car tail-lights and windows where the glow spills out around closed curtains. Some of these images are unpeopled, suggesting a world that renews itself year on year, shedding its leaves and standing stoic through the elements until the ground thaws out once more. On the one hand there is that vast world beyond the front door: ghostly forests, frozen waterfalls, Nordic islands, scrawny park railings swallowed by mist, waves frothing over cold shingle, Venice looking melancholy under grey skies, damp Welsh streets after dark. It is a line that neatly divides many of the wintery images in Magnum’s archives, too.
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