Keith Tyson created this alternative snowman for a feature in the Guardian to examine what snowman represent to us: 'We live under the myth that if we produce things they're going to last. When in fact, everything we make is like a snowman- it's all going to melt eventually'. Tyson says that, as children, we first learn about 'impermanence and human vanitas' from snowmen, and indeed this picture shows my first ever snowman (although it is similar to any other snowman that any other child would make). In fact, this was the first snowfall where there was enough snow to build a snowman, a consequence of global warming, caused by human vanitas and a sign of impermanence. A further link is that Tyson's snowman is made of glass-fibre poly-carbonate and then painted to look like snow, an attempt at preservation which corresponds with our intentions in taking photos. The fact that I am now looking back on this photograph more than a decade later, and that I (and my snowmen) are many centimetres shorter, shows how successful these attempts to freeze (if you'll pardon the pun) time are.
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