December Ice, Vicinity of Brockton

The pond fills the lower two-thirds of the frame, smooth and dark under a pale sky, its ice marked here and there with lighter patches and fine cracks. The colors carry the cast of early Kodachrome: the ice and the sky lean blue, the shadows that run across the ice are violet, and the rounded corners and dark border of the slide mount show at the edges of the scan. In the foreground a scatter of dry reeds and stems is frozen into the surface, and a low rocky bank crosses the lower left corner.

Two figures stand in the middle distance with their backs to the camera, close together, in dark jackets and trousers, each on skates. The one on the left holds a hockey stick horizontally behind his back; the other holds one too. Their shadows fall long toward the camera. To the right of them, a lone skater in a red top and dark trousers moves away across the ice, arms out for balance. Farther out, near the far shore, seven or eight more small figures cluster on the ice, some with sticks, apparently playing hockey.

The far shore is a line of bare deciduous trees with a few dark pines among them, the pines keeping their green against the gray branches, and between the trees stand several houses, one large and white with many windows, another a dark barn-like building on the right. In the left foreground the bare trunk and thin spreading branches of a large tree lean over the water, a smaller bare tree beside it. The sky is pale with thin high cloud. No snow lies on the ice or the ground; no vehicles, no signs, no lettering appear anywhere in the frame.

A slide from December 1940

The slide is one of the FSA/OWI color photographs held by the Library of Congress — the collection of the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information, the federal agencies whose photographers documented American life in the 1930s and 1940s. The catalogue entry gives the maker, Jack Delano, photographer; the date, 1940 Dec.; the medium, a 35mm Kodachrome transparency; and the title, “Skating, vicinity of Brockton, Mass.” The image is in the public domain.

What the photograph was made for, the record does not say. It gives no names for the skaters, no name for the pond, no day of the month, no hour, and no note of the assignment. Nothing in the frame dates the skating to one year rather than another — no vehicles, no lettering, no clue beyond the film itself. The date is 1940 Dec.

Bare ice, low sun, no snow

December is written on the pond in what is missing. The trees along the far shore are bare, so the leaves have gone. The ice says what the bare branches only hint at: the cold has held long enough to bear a crowd. The ice is bare too — dark and smooth, not the white surface of midwinter — the clean early freeze a New England December can lay down before the first snow arrives. The sun sits low on the right, and every figure on the ice throws a long shadow toward the camera. The skaters are already playing; this is a pond given over to the season, not one being tested cautiously from the shore.

The film does part of the seasonal work. Early Kodachrome pushed winter toward blue, and here the ice reads as cold metal, the shadows as violet, the air itself with an edge on it. The white house on the far shore keeps its color against the bare trees, and the red jacket holds the frame’s one warm note, moving away across the dark ice.

The frame is a choice about where to point. It points at the ice and at the backs of two skaters, and it leaves out the rest of the place and the rest of the year. Brockton, the town named in the title, lies somewhere outside the frame; what the record calls the vicinity is all the photograph holds. The two central figures skate away, and their faces never appear. Where they came from, the photograph does not say, and the record does not say either.

The rest of December is outside the frame too: the short days, the dark closing in early, the snows the month has yet to bring. The photograph keeps only the pond it was pointed at, the figures on it, and the houses along the far shore.