Tideland

After five years of looking closely through his camera at a small beach, David Batchelder no longer sees the shores as we know them. His vision now is of a private reality within the tideland. In Tideland, Batchelder invites you to join him in his visual journey into a tideland like none that has yet been photographed. Batchelder uses the camera, not to picture more clearly that which we already know, but to discover and capture the unsung beauty of our land. He shares with us an inexplicable, ambiguous, imaginative and odd world of magical visions – landscapes, spaces, creatures and curious objects, disfigured and eroded by the ocean. Although Batchelder uses digital processes, his approach to creative camera work has its origin very much in the era of film, using a digital camera and Photoshop as one would have used a film camera and a darkroom. David Campany’s essay introduces Batchelder’s tideland world where the viewer’s imagination and memory take over and, you too, leave the beach as you now know it.