Rhinebeck has a reputation. Quaint. Moneyed. Good at brunch. And while all of that is true—yes, the pancakes are pricy and yes, you will run into a celebrity buying goat cheese—it’s also, still, somehow, a real town. Not a simulacrum. Not a backdrop. A place where things happen that aren’t posted about in real time.
In Rhinebeck a priest blesses a red-tailed hawk like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Grown men chase a soccer ball across a field with comical intensity while the kids wait for their turn. A Porsche suns itself on East Market Street, just up the road from the hardware store and across from a shop that sells felt hats hand-formed on century-old blocks. You can get soft serve in one hand and a six-pack of house-brewed saison in the other and still make it to the forest before dusk.
There’s a nostalgia that clings to Rhinebeck, but not the cloying kind. It’s less “vintage” and more “well-maintained.” It’s not trying to go back in time—it just never fully surrendered to the present. The result is a town that runs on its own frequency, not quite past or future, but tuned to a kind of perennial now. Old trees, new shops. Skate parks and art galleries. Pickup trucks and vintage convertibles.
Photographer David McIntyre spent a few days in May capturing that rhythm, assembling a dozen visual dispatches from a community that’s often romanticized but rarely looked at straight on. His images neither flatter nor deflate. They observe. The players, the places, the rituals—sacred and mundane—are all treated with the same even gaze. And what emerges is a portrait of a village that, despite its fame and fuss, remains in many ways defiantly local. A place you can visit, but never fully know unless you’ve waited in line for a cone at Del’s or caught the light in Ferncliff Forest at just the right hour.
This article appears in June 2025.
