There’s something about winter on Block Island.

The crystalline light slants low and shadows are long. The land is lashed by the wind. You sometimes have to turn away to catch your breath.

We’re drawn to this place of extremes—to what is revealed by winter’s brutality and hard light; to the paradox of a place built for warm summer afternoons, momentarily frozen solid; and to a kind of haunting: the ghosts of summer, of the Victorians, the farmers and fishermen, the stone wall builders, the Manisses and the rippling land, dropped like unfinished work by retreating ice, 15,000 years ago.

William Faulkner wrote that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” In winter, the past is laid bare on Block Island. We wanted to honor that past by finding beauty in its state of suspension, its endurance, decay, and strivings.

This exhibition looks at Block Island winters at two points, roughly 50 years apart. Most of the pictures were taken in the early and late 1970s. Then, in the winter of 2025–2026, we revisited and reshot selected locations.

More has changed than not changed, of course. Horizons are more cluttered with houses, and the low, nearly treeless brush has been replaced with taller growth. The island is another 50 years further removed from farming.

The tension between development and land preservation is palpable. Swaths of land in trust preserve what is dear to many—and drives up the cost of remaining developable land. Islanders will continue struggling to balance saving what draws people to the island with what can destroy it.

What will the next 50 years bring? Sea level is projected to rise another one to two feet. The cliffs will continue to erode, and the island will continue to accrete northward. Trees will form an ever-taller canopy; vistas will be shorter and the horizon even more punctuated with construction.

And still, the raw light, the hard wind, the salt air, and the ghosts—they will remain.