Spooky photos of ice castles

Frankie Carino is a photographer and sculptor who lately has been focusing on ice castles — i.e. human-created buildings made of ice.

He's taken some gorgeous and eerie photos of them; in his lens, the ice has an unsettlingly organic quality and transmits light on a diffuse and crepuscular register. I'm super into them — several of my faves are below, reprinted with his permission.

You can see more of Carino's work at his web site and his Instagram feed, and BOOOOOOOM recently interviewed him about his ice-castle work …

While searching for ice caves to photograph, he came across "ice castles" constructed at various resorts as winter attractions. "I loved this idea of making massive ice sculptures just to melt away and rebuild the following year," he explains. Made through the same processes as glaciers or other large deposits of minerals, the geological cycle of the castles has been drastically shortened. "A collection of wonderful people work hard behind a hotel to create this uniquely human landscape. The construction requires a huge amount of water and human power, arguably an irresponsible amount, seeing the entire thing is gone by April. But the result is a beautiful display of humans' deep fascination with minerals."