The speaker for the evening is Ned Walthall, currently an MFA candidate in photography at the New Hampshire Institute of Art.

The title of his presentation is “After Audubon: Photographing the Egrets of San Antonio”.

For several years, roughly four or five trees in Brackenridge Park in San Antonio have been home to several species of egrets—Great Egrets, Cattle Egrets, Snowy Egrets, Little Blue Herons, to name a few. The birds show up in early Spring, build nests, raise their chicks, and are gone by Fall. They return each year. Their beauty is extraordinary, but their number and concentration in a public park are a problem for the city. Their presence there has become a kind of parable for our time; it speaks to our love for the natural world and our seeming inability to avoid destroying it.  And it raises a difficult question for photographers: what does it mean to photograph nature on a planet that may be dying.

Please visit his website at https://nwalthall.smugmug.com/