By Brenda Shufelt
This month we’re highlighting an exhibition at Hudson Hall that focuses on protecting the natural world for its own sake. Walking is a series of large prints based on photographs David McIntyre, Claverack resident and Scottish-born photographer, filmmaker, and artist took while, well, out walking.
In a WAMC Roundtable interview, David described his process of experiencing nature, photographing what he saw, and then finding an editing process that would show truly what was experienced. He took lots of photographs of a particular area, then layered and edited them digitally so the final product would represent what his human eye and brain saw and felt. Prior to this experimentation, he had not been satisfied with his landscape photographs. In the Roundtable interview David stated: “So maybe my mind is, like, taking a movie, like, taking 24 frames a second and compressing all these images, so like a composite.” His process attempts to replicate the complexity of how he sees nature in the moment.
When I saw these large prints at the opening I could not stop looking at them. Though manipulated digitally they celebrate nature. Viewing them, indeed, gave me the feeling of being out, well, walking! The prints are deliciously sensory, loaded with density of color and shape and the chaotic organization of the natural world.
Walking, the exhibition takes its title from the book by Henry David Thoreau in which he writes that nature has a special magnetism which, if you let it in, will guide you. David said in the Roundtable interview: “When I think about the climate crisis, I feel like we’re always looking to the people who got us into the mess to get us out and I think what Thoreau is alluding to is that maybe we should look to nature. It’s 500 billion years old. It seems like, as a bodily living organism, it must have some ideas about how to get out of this.”
Walking, at Hudson Hall through October 8, shows the power and immense beauty of nature that is so hard to replicate in a 2-dimensional way. It can give us the confidence that the answers to the problem with climate change we’ve gotten ourselves into are in nature itself.
Hudson Hall is located at 327 Warren Street in Hudson, NY and is open Tues-Fri from 9am-5pm and Sat-Sun from 12pm-5pm.
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