Autumn, Keats said, is the season of mists. A photo essay by Steffen Schrägle captures mist from New Zealand to Argentina, while Robert Macfarlane sums it up in words ...
Mist is trickster weather. It steals silently in, turns familiar landscapes strange, dampens sounds, blurs vision—then clears suddenly and without warning. It has fairy-tale properties: to find yourself in mist is to be both enchanted and unsettled. One of the eeriest hours of my life came in the Scottish Highlands. Five of us had climbed up, in thick snow, onto the summit plateau of a mountain called Beinn a’ Bhuird. Five hundred feet short of the plateau we met a fine white mist. The snow and the mist combined to produce the phenomenon known as white-out, in which air and ground seem to melt together and the world becomes depthless.
Pictured: South Island, New Zealand, June 2009 “I was driving around on a location scouting for a job and came upon this lake,” Steffen Schrägle says. “It was amazing to see the red light coming through the mist, as if from a painting. A kind of fairy tale. Nothing moved, there was no wind, it was just magic to see this moment. I still don’t know exactly where it was”
