First Snow by Paul Octavious

Good morning collectors! It's Sara, with a snow day surprise—not the kind where you get to stay home, build tunnels, forts and snowmen, then drink hot chocolate and watch movies, but just as good. First Snow is the wintry fellow to Paul Octavious's summery Kite Hill which we set a sail last September.

Seasonal siblings, both works are from Paul's series, Same Hill, Different Day. And I know what you're thinking: First Snow looks a little like Joe Holmes's Sledding Hill at Dusk, too. The works are similar, yes, but different, and not just because Joe is photographing in NYC and Paul is in Chicago. This is actually where their works depart: Joe seems to find those specific things that make New York New York—the day-to-day (but still, somehow, cinematic) instances that become icons. Paul, on the other hand, photographs this one hill that could be just about anywhere—a small nondescript mound with a soaring sky standing in for wherever we might want to be. Which brings us back to where these works converge again.

Joe's Sledding Hill at Dusk, comes from his series of photographs, The Urban Wilderness, in which Brooklyn's Prospect Park, wrapped in snow, is stripped of all evidence of its urban environs. The park becomes pastoral—the fantasy territory of childhoods lived elsewhere. Paul's hill too, is usually bare of hints that might belie its true location. Instead, First Snow is made personal by Paul's documentation of the people that visit this same place, over months and years, and the things they bring: sleds, kites, fireworks, bikes.

In his visiting and revisiting, Paul's stumbled upon many a marvels, including, on one foggy, dreamy day, Ghana's World Cup team kicking a ball around. His hill, it seems, offers these things up—just as New York gives Joe yellow cabs, and a yellow dress, red lights, and the tools of passing trades—as thanks for paying attention. They are I think, like the leaves, the apples, the wood, shared between boy and tree in Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree.* What Paul and Joe and Shel seem to know (and share with the rest of us) is that these gifts are better than what shelters, feeds and sustains us, these are the things that nourish us.

* The Giving Tree! Gifts! Of life! Goodness. As I wrapped this up and sent Jen a link for editing, I was a bit worried it all sounds so cheesy. But I do mean it, even if, in thinking of Chicago, I'm afraid a bit of Oprah wore off on me.