The Vanishing Point: Elise Aalto's Snow Studies
Stories
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October 24, 2025
There is a moment in Elise Aalto's Snow Studies where a reindeer stands motionless against a field of white so complete that the animal seems less photographed than conjured—a shadow barely darker than the air around it, its antlers faint as charcoal marks on rice paper. The snow here is not falling but suspended, caught in that peculiar northern light that refuses to commit to day or night. You cannot tell if the creature is moving toward you or away, or if it has been standing there for minutes or millennia. This is the threshold Aalto wants us to inhabit: the place where seeing becomes uncertain, where the world reduces itself to gradients of absence.
Currently on view at Pace Gallery in New York, Snow Studies compiles three years of work across Iceland's interior plateaus, the coastal reaches of northern Norway, and the volcanic plains of Hokkaido. Aalto, who grew up in Rovaniemi near the Arctic Circle, shoots exclusively in conditions most photographers would abandon—whiteouts, blizzards, the blue hours when landscape and sky become indistinguishable. Her subjects—arctic foxes, ptarmigan, the occasional lone figure—emerge not as focal points but as interruptions in a visual field that wants to remain empty. A fox's ear. The curve of a back. The rest dissolved into luminous static.
What distinguishes Aalto's project from documentary wildlife photography is her interest in snow itself as both medium and subject. She has spoken in interviews about wanting to photograph "the space between things," the way weather erases hierarchy and flattens the world into layers of opacity and revelation. There are echoes here of Roni Horn's obsessive studies of Icelandic water, where repetition becomes a method for tracking the imperceptible, and of Hiroshi Sugimoto's seascapes, which likewise probe the boundary between representation and abstraction. But where Sugimoto's work trades in geological time, Aalto's photographs feel more provisional—images that might disappear if you look away.
The gallery presentation amplifies this instability. The large-format prints, some nearly eight feet wide, hang in a dim space punctuated by slow film loops projected without sound. There are no labels beside each work, no didactic wall text to anchor interpretation. You are meant to move slowly, to let your eyes adjust, to notice what you might have missed: the faint tracks in the foreground, the way a bird's wing mirrors the shape of distant mountains. It is an experience designed to frustrate the quick glance, the Instagram reflex. Aalto's work asks for something closer to meditation.
This is photography at its most reductive and most generous—a practice that strips away until only questions remain. What do we mean when we say we've seen something? How much can be removed before an image ceases to exist? Aalto offers no answers, only these pale, patient visions: worlds where presence is always partial, where the animal and the atmosphere are collaborators in their own vanishing.
There is a moment in Elise Aalto's Snow Studies where a reindeer stands motionless against a field of white so complete that the animal seems less photographed than conjured—a shadow barely darker than the air around it, its antlers faint as charcoal marks on rice paper. The snow here is not falling but suspended, caught in that peculiar northern light that refuses to commit to day or night. You cannot tell if the creature is moving toward you or away, or if it has been standing there for minutes or millennia. This is the threshold Aalto wants us to inhabit: the place where seeing becomes uncertain, where the world reduces itself to gradients of absence.
Currently on view at Pace Gallery in New York, Snow Studies compiles three years of work across Iceland's interior plateaus, the coastal reaches of northern Norway, and the volcanic plains of Hokkaido. Aalto, who grew up in Rovaniemi near the Arctic Circle, shoots exclusively in conditions most photographers would abandon—whiteouts, blizzards, the blue hours when landscape and sky become indistinguishable. Her subjects—arctic foxes, ptarmigan, the occasional lone figure—emerge not as focal points but as interruptions in a visual field that wants to remain empty. A fox's ear. The curve of a back. The rest dissolved into luminous static.
What distinguishes Aalto's project from documentary wildlife photography is her interest in snow itself as both medium and subject. She has spoken in interviews about wanting to photograph "the space between things," the way weather erases hierarchy and flattens the world into layers of opacity and revelation. There are echoes here of Roni Horn's obsessive studies of Icelandic water, where repetition becomes a method for tracking the imperceptible, and of Hiroshi Sugimoto's seascapes, which likewise probe the boundary between representation and abstraction. But where Sugimoto's work trades in geological time, Aalto's photographs feel more provisional—images that might disappear if you look away.
The gallery presentation amplifies this instability. The large-format prints, some nearly eight feet wide, hang in a dim space punctuated by slow film loops projected without sound. There are no labels beside each work, no didactic wall text to anchor interpretation. You are meant to move slowly, to let your eyes adjust, to notice what you might have missed: the faint tracks in the foreground, the way a bird's wing mirrors the shape of distant mountains. It is an experience designed to frustrate the quick glance, the Instagram reflex. Aalto's work asks for something closer to meditation.
This is photography at its most reductive and most generous—a practice that strips away until only questions remain. What do we mean when we say we've seen something? How much can be removed before an image ceases to exist? Aalto offers no answers, only these pale, patient visions: worlds where presence is always partial, where the animal and the atmosphere are collaborators in their own vanishing.
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