Jessica Lange American, b. 1949
Edition of 10 plus 2 artist's proofs
A snow road runs away from the bottom left corner with a set of tyre tracks down it. The field to the right is white and empty. On a low rise, just right of centre, a single dark spruce stands alone, and directly above its crown hangs the sun, low and white and no bigger than a coin. Around the sun, drawn in the grey air, is a wide faint ring. Treelines lie flat and black along both edges of the horizon. The grain of the film is coarse enough to see.
The ring is a halo, which is ice crystals in the upper air bending light through sixty degrees, and it is the most reliably supernatural-looking thing the atmosphere does. Every culture that saw one read it as a sign. It is not a sign. It is optics, and it happens over a field in Minnesota on a cold morning whether or not there is a road, a tree or a photographer there to take it personally.
Lange has put the tree exactly under it, which is the whole decision. Without the tree the halo would be weather. With the tree it becomes an arrangement, a small dark upright standing precisely where the ring would have wanted something to stand. Nothing in the picture claims that this means anything. It simply lets the coincidence hold still long enough to be looked at, which is the most a photograph can honestly do with a miracle.
