Photographs of Snowmen (1854–1950) — The Public Domain Review

The earliest known photograph of a snowman was taken by Mary Dillwyn, circa 1853, the first female photographer in Wales. The bright exposure of the salt print makes him almost invisible, as his body fades out into a field of white light. From there, Frosty’s cousins flocked to have their portraits taken. Our selection below contains “Mr Snow” with a Fu Manchu, a gigantic Azerbaijani iceman, the towering Alaskan “Father of the Glaciers”, a slushy Muscovite from 1906 (as surprised to see us as we are him), a criminal snowman cuffed by Australian police, Dalmation-like humanoids with leaf-pocked skin, one “snow suffragette”, one snow Queen Victoria, rotund bon vivants, Michelin Man–adjacent nightmares, and many more wonders raised from fallen powder. What’s most notable about the photographs here — taken in Finland, France, Turkey, China, Germany, Japan, and elsewhere — is the consistency of these compositions. A group of people (children, soldiers, geishas) pose before loveable, baffled, and slightly creepy mounds. (We’ve used the familiar “snowman” in this piece, but most snowmen are androgynous — sculptures that are specifically women are rarer, but more common still than explicitly masculine figures, unless the tobacco pipe a man does make.)