The Hoover Institution Library & Archives invites you to a hybrid event on Thursday, February 12, 2026 from 4:30 - 6:00 p.m. PT. Organized in conjunction with Eastern Europe and Beyond: Photographic Albums Revealed, in person and online attendees will be encouraged to engage with the exhibition in expansive terms and to consider how photographic evidence portrays the human condition throughout history.

Out of the horrible loss of life of the American Civil War, an unlikely hero emerged—a photographer who had no idea that he was portraying the vast armies of the dead, ennobling and gracing them as individual souls lost to the world, but who kept at it, day after day, year after year, decade after decade, until his dying day—making a heaven that fell to the ground. In this talk, Alexander Nemerov will take the audience into the art and singular poetic grace of Wilson Bentley, the greatest photographer of snowflakes
who ever lived.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Alexander Nemerov is the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities, Stanford University. He has published widely on different photographers; he has a special interest in the 1940s and has written about photography and films of the Second World War in several books and essays. Every fall Nemerov teaches a popular course on art, “How to Look at Art and Why.”