Project Description
SHEL NEUFELD
“Can I live in this human-created world with the same beauty, presence, and connection that I feel when I am in nature? What is our role?”
These questions permeate Shel Neufeld’s work. And these questions have directed his work and life, starting with a weekend in an ancient forest.
Neufeld started taking photography more seriously after he moved to BC from Ontario in 1997. He was included in a group of artists and conservation-minded people who collaborated with the Squamish Nation to bring the public up for camping weekends in Sims Creek, a pristine forest valley in the Squamish watershed.
The experience had a profound and lasting impression on Neufeld. In this untouched forest he saw how complete, beautiful, and spiritually rich the natural world could be with no humans around.
So initially, I really had a view that pristine nature, free of humans, was positive, and the human world was negative, a really black-and-white perspective.”
Since then he has taken many trips, in company and alone, taken many photographs, seeking answers and a way to moderate this perspective. The resulting photos are arresting. The viewer gets the sense that something is beckoning in each shot. A deeper or altered understanding calls in the blood red of spawning salmon, the perfect spheres of droplets, the deeply satisfying “found” compositions of nature all around us.
Neufeld invites us to see the minutiae in the heavens and the magnificence in a leaf, to ponder the (in)significance of humankind. Each shot asks, “What is our place in this?” He succeeds in taking us beyond the binary “us or Nature” stance to someplace more overarching—maybe it’s “immersing.” A recent fraught, wet, solo six-day hiking trip in the area around Princess Louisa Inlet, during which he was rained on continually, sprained an ankle, and was dangerously detoured by a trickle-turned-torrent, shifted something for him.
“This trip was incredibly profound for me. The wetness for so long was like a cleansing, full-body immersion as I squeezed through the drenched blueberry bushes while rain poured from above. I can’t really describe what happened for me up there. And that is what nature is for me—I think what turns up in my photos, in the ones that work out, is a little piece of the indescribable.”