Earlier this year, members of the Morrison-Shearer Foundation’s Board of Trustees visited the Chicago Film Archives and the studio of noted photographer, Judy Natal. Through these visits and others, the Foundation is establishing the basis for its future support of the creative processes of media artists and their collaborators, set to launch in 2025.
Since 2008, the Foundation’s extensive collection of dance films has been housed by Chicago Film Archives in order to manage and care for the films in ideal environmental conditions. In 2019, the Foundation gifted its collection to CFA in order to make the films widely available and to preserve them in perpetuity. Our visit this year, led by Founder and Executive Director, Nancy Watrous, allowed the Foundation’s trustees to see the work that CFA has done to store and preserve the collection among the hundreds of others in the Archives’ state-of-the art facilities.
Then, in acknowledgment of Sybil Shearer’s long-established reputation as a “nature-mystic” and Helen Balfour Morrison’s commitment to the artform of documentary portraiture, it was fitting that we visited the studio of Judy Natal. Her perspective on the place that humankind holds in the natural world offers a complementary dialogue of generative ideas and creative practice with both Morrison and Shearer.
Judy is a Chicago-based artist and Professor Emeritus of Photography at Columbia College Chicago. The Foundation was introduced to Natal through her work as a member of Ragdale’s Curatorial Board, where she has served as an advisor for many years. Her photographs are in prominent, permanent public and private collections throughout the United States and abroad. She has received numerous grants and fellowships and has also been awarded many artist residencies nationally and internationally.
Currently, Natal is working on an interactive, immersive, installation and book project titled The Weather Diaries. This is a creative, non-fiction/speculative fiction work that weaves Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and Hawai’i with archival images, video interviews of farmers, fisherman, scientists, environmental activists, and artists, music interludes, and craft, to celebrate traditional ecological knowledge.
The Weather Diaries continues Natal’s earlier explorations of global warming while cultivating a broad-based audience that crosses disciplines & genres. It aspires to put a human face on statistics, bringing an immediacy to the dramatic weather events we witness around the globe, honoring powers of observation as profound sources of knowledge interpreted through image and narrative that are impossible for statistics to depict. The goal of the project is to bring attention to the personal & emotional dimensions of climate change, inviting people to participate through their own stories, expanding notions of the climate change “expert,” while interpreting weather cycles written on the land, sea and sky.
All photos © Judy Natal 1998-2023/2024
