David Batchelder: Alfred & Me

David Batchelder's images are labyrinths of wondrous forms, surprising colors, and shifting layers. They give us the impression of flying over landscape formations, snowy mountain ranges or meandering rivers; or alternatingly we seem to be in the midst of choppy seascapes, where unfamiliar creatures are rising up out of the blue-green depths. However, the photographs depict nothing more than banal segments of a beach in Charleston, South Carolina. The abstract quality of these natural motifs bring out hidden ideas. Suddenly we see faces, ghosts, animals, and plants.
Batchelder's work is an homage to Alfred Ehrhardt's series Das Watt (The Tidelands, 1933-1936). In contrast to the German avant-garde photographer from the 1930s, Batchelder, an American born in 1939, is not interested in the laws of structure but the chaotic, strange, surreal, and irrational-in short, the world of dreams and the imagination.