How early photographs of snowflakes shaped modern ideas about ‘what it means to be unique’

A pioneering photography collection, now housed in the Smithsonian Institution Archives, captures how early innovations in microphotography helped shape our understanding of snowflakes.

Wilson Bentley, a “bona-fide snowflake obsessive,” essentially jerry-rigged a microscope to a camera to snap close-ups of flakes in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Bentley’s work inspired the notion that snowflakes “provide many of us with our earliest impressions of what it means to be unique,” The New Yorker noted.

“Every crystal was a masterpiece of design,” he wrote. After Bentley’s death, the photographs helped scientists craft the first lab-grown snowflakes — work that still continues today.