The Flatirons Photo Club will meet Thursday, November 9 at 7PM at Hashem Synagogue (our regular monthly meeting spot). The competition topic is Travel. See the Competition sidebar for submission details.

Beth Wald, a documentary photographer who creates compelling visual narratives that look at our relationship with the natural world — of which we are an integral and often destructive part — will be the featured speaker at the Flatirons Photo Club monthly meeting and competition from 7-9 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 9, at Har HaShem in Boulder.

Wald thrives when working far off the grid and immersing herself in a place and a culture. Her wide-ranging career has taken her to remote corners of the world for many publications, including National Geographic, Smithsonian, The New York Times, Outside and many others. Wald has also partnered with organizations such as the Wildlife Conservation Society, Panthera, Alaska Conservation Foundation, Conservación Patagónica and many others. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Rowell Award, POY among others.

Her presentation: Immersion – Journeys in Light and Time

Wald has explored the rich diversity of natural environments and cultures under threat around the world – from Afghanistan, to Alaska, to the Amazon. In this talk, she will show work and discuss how she got started in photography, her creative evolution and the work she has done documenting a range of places, peoples and issues, including:

• mountain peoples, wildlife and their interaction in the Pamir Mountains and Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan and Tajikistan;
• the traditional sustainable harvest of the wool of vicuña that has helped this endangered species recover, and the resurgence of ancient weaving and other indigenous traditions in Puno and Sacred Valley;
• the creation of national parks in Chilean Patagonia that will protect a range of environments from temperate rainforest to steppe grasslands, and the wildlife that depends on these habitats;
• the environmental and social impacts of large-scale metal mines being built in a remote region of the Ecuadorean Amazon;
• groundbreaking work to restore the full range of species that once existed, in a vast wetlands region of Northern Argentina, which is the largest re-wilding project in the Americas.

Her work presents the beauty of pristine and undeveloped corners of the world, and tells visual stories about struggles to save ecosystems, species, ancient knowledge and ways of being and in her presentation, Beth Wald will look at the role that photography can play in these efforts by erasing boundaries between us and distant-endangered places and peoples.