ZOOM | Fall/Winter 2019

C
an 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 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.”
VIEW MORE OF SHEL NEUFELD’S PHOTOGRAPHY AT SHELNEUFELD.COM.
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