BRATTLEBORO — Emmy Award-winning lensman Federico Pardo has circled the globe for such clients as National Geographic and Univision. But in his recent downtime, he has focused not on the warmth of his native Latin America but instead the cool sight of ice fishing in southern Vermont.
“I first thought, ‘Who would want to sit on a frozen pond on hours on end to wait for a fish?’” Pardo says. “Then I saw the look of the shanties and the landscape of winter — a world I had never seen before. All of the elements were attractive to me.”
Environmental journalist Erik Hoffner boasts an equally expansive career as a contributor to publications ranging from Orion magazine to the international nature news website Mongabay.com. But he, too, is happy to center his camera on the icy waters near his home in western Massachusetts.
“When fishing holes refreeze overnight, they create fertile ground for nature’s wild artistic side,” Hoffner says. “These perfectly augered circles become worlds at once interstellar and cellular, dreamlike and tactile.”
Pardo and Hoffner haven’t met but nonetheless have come together at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center through a pair of complementary exhibits.
The first, “Ice Shanties: Fishing, People & Culture,” features Pardo’s photos alongside Vermont Folklife Center recordings of local anglers speaking about their structures and sport.
Pardo took a circuitous route to New England. Born in Colombia, he earned a biology degree from Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá and a master of fine arts in science and natural history filmmaking from Montana State University. Traveling to Vermont to visit friends, Pardo began photographing the shanties on Brattleboro’s frozen West River floodplain in 2016, playing with long-duration exposures lit by both sunset and moonlight.
“Even though I had lived in the U.S. and experienced a couple of winters, I had not seen these crazy pop-up structures on the ice,” recalls Pardo, who’s now based in Green Bay, Wisconsin, but is on the road three-quarters of the year. “Everything just clicked and I started shooting.”
The second show, “Ice Visions,” spotlights Hoffner’s 20-year exploration of area lakes and ponds. Aiming his camera downward, the New Englander noticed cracks and crannies that, photographed in black and white, come to life as eyes, stars and galaxies.
Museum curator Mara Williams calls Hoffner this generation’s “Snowflake” Bentley, the pioneering Vermont photographer who used a microscope to capture the first image of an individual crystal in 1885. But Hoffner’s observations sound more like contemporary Green Mountain author and activist Bill McKibben, who wrote the first book introducing the idea of global warming to a general audience.
“Due to milder than usual temperatures during the past winter,” Hoffner says, “on many mornings I found barely a skin of new ice covering the prior day’s fishing holes. Bubbles pooled up at the surface before freezing, creating striking new kinds of formations I’d never seen before, ones that perhaps reveal the fingerprint of a warming climate.”
More information about the exhibits — appearing with a “Figuration Never Died” show featuring works of the late Vermonter Wolf Kahn and nine other inventive artists — is available on the museum’s website. Organizers hope they shed new light on what many consider to be a dark season.
“Pardo’s striking photographs of ice shanties and Hoffner’s exquisite, almost abstract images of frozen-over ice-fishing holes provide viewers with complementary perspectives on an iconic Vermont pastime,” museum director Danny Lichtenfeld says. “Together, they illuminate a welcome sign of winter.”
