My new show at the Munroe Center for the Arts in Lexington, MA is up with a reception this Thursday, November 14, from 5:30-7:30.

"Seeing" was the title for a book colleague and art historian Norma Steinberg and I conceived of and worked on in the 90s. It was written into a prospectus and submitted to a publisher. The book was never published.

The publisher we selected had been pursuing me for years, wanting me to write a photo textbook. Once we submitted the proposal they modified the book so extensively it was really no longer our book anymore. I believe they wanted our names and academic credentials as validation but not the book as we proposed. We walked away.

What was it? Seeing used my photographs and rationale for the way I worked as a foundation for a logic of looking at things photographically. It delved into photographs potential as way to arrive at a photographic vision and a photographic  philosophy of seeing. 

Norma was a colleague and friend and a remarkable addition to our Department at Northeastern. She taught our photo history course and always came to my classes' final critiques. She brought a unique perspective that included historical context. 

The book was also specifically about looking at black and white photographs, although chapter 5 was to be titled "Color" to deal with my practice of always toning my black and white photographs.

I'm going to quote from the prospectus, written by Steinberg. This one, the proposal for chapter 7 called: 

The Personal

Throughout the history of photography, we read the same questions and responses about the nature of the medium-that it is either a mechanical medium of which we expect a truthful representation of reality, or that it is an art form, which is less truthful. As an artist Rantoul squeezes his pictures from within his own experiences, preferences, and feelings. It is a subjective process, involving decisions about where to go, when to stop to photograph, how to position the camera, what light to use, how to expose the film, how to process the film for the control of contrast, what size, tonality and color to make the print and so on. That is what is meant by photographers when they say "make photographs" rather than "take photographs" and it belies the idea that photography is an objective medium.

Or here, where she's explaining Fast and Slow (my term):

There are two meanings to the phrase "fast and slow." The first, more poetic, meaning is concerned with a directorial approach. A "slow" picture is one with obstructions or challenges to the viewer's ability to move through the space of the picture. A "fast" picture, on the other hand, permits the viewer's eye to move into visual depth. Sometimes the vertical lines move toward the center and at other times verticals bend outward. Slow photographs are planar and frontal, and often contain a visual screen across the picture plane. They may even be abstract, as for example, the New York or Gloucester pictures of Aaron Siskin. They may seem planar, as for example when a Rantoul landscape eliminates the sky and removes the sense of a horizon. In this definition of "fast and slow," the photographer's sense of design becomes important.  Rantoul states: "A fast picture has visual depth with strong foreground-to-background information. My 'fast' pictures have prominent foregrounds and acute convergence." Sometimes this is the direct result of the equipment used because certain cameras have a propensity to tilt the scene at the edge. The camera as a definer of form will be discussed in several places throughout the book.

I'd correct this last by clarifying that it is probably the width of the lens that makes some photographs "faster".

The second meaning of the phrase is more literal-the actual time it takes to make the pictures, the choreography of the artist's movements through space, and the significance of that timing to the final work. This structural meaning of "fast and slow", relates to those bodies of work that take months or even years to complete as compared to the spontaneous series pictures described in Chapter One.

It is important to keep in mind that we were still firmly in the analog world of conventional film-based photography in the mid 90s and using prints made in my darkroom as our foundation. 

Of course, we should have moved on to other publishers as we had a viable concept. I think we were so crushed at how this one publisher mislead us we gave up.

Last, it was a wonderful experience working with Norma on this project. She forced me to be focused, to express my concepts clearly and what I'd been teaching for years into a cohesive and cogent sequence of ideas. 

As always your comments are welcome.

I know I don't post here so much these days. I guess my head's in a different space.

But I do have a brief observation to share with you that you might find helpful. I have been going through past years files, specifically 2009. That was the year I was on sabbatical leave from teaching at Northeastern. I spent most the of the fall in Italy photographing. So, I've been going through those files, which were originally stored and edited in Apple's Aperture, then later converted and run into Lightroom after Apple no longer supported Aperture (thanks Apple).

Trieste, 2009 ©Neal Rantoul

It's difficult work going though so many files. It's numbing and tends to make me want to go to sleep (whether that's a comment on how boring my pictures are is not for me to say). I need to take frequent breaks and reapproach later fresh of mind and spirit. 

But my point is this: we all have made compromises in the gear we use because we're not able to afford the best. However, in this case, I was sufficiently along in my career and secure enough in my job that I could afford the best at the time I was working. So this work from Italy I made in 2009 still holds up today qualitatively. I am thankful for that.

Italy 2009 ©NEAL RANTOUL

In those years I was using a Nikon D3x, a 24 MP full frame camera that was  expensive but that made gorgeous files. Too big and too expensive ($8000) it was a camera that I grew to love as it never failed and made pictures that hold their own  compared to anything I have done either before or after.

This includes lenses. I had some very good glass in those years as well.  Notable was the Nikon 14-24mm f2.8, a huge unwieldily thing that was as good as the 38mm Biogon I'd used for years on the Superwide (Hasselblad). Added to my kit were the 24-70mm f 2.8 and the 70-200 mm f2.8 Nikons. Perhaps not up to present day standards but good enough and state of the art in their time.

If you are a career photographer it makes sense to work with the best equipment  you can. This for today as you make pictures, but for tomorrow as well, as quickly new work becomes past work and sits in a library of imagery you can't know now is important or not. Going through these pictures I made 15 years ago makes me grateful for the sacrifices I made back then to work with top gear for I can't fault the results.

Sistiana Mare, Italy © NEAL RANTOUL

Mistakes I've made. In photography, too many to list. Some big, some small. From underexposing, overdeveloping, losing negatives, losing files, making unintentionally blurry images from a plane at 1000 feet up, and so on. 

I will share one big one: a trip to the Bahamas in the 80s for a spring break vacation with family, my daughter Maru about 2 years old. Being who I am I brought a 4 x 5 camera and 100 sheets of Kodak Plus-X film. I managed to get away several times and shot most of the whole box, changing out exposed sheets of film each night in a dark closet with fresh sheets so as to be ready to shoot the next day. Back home in my darkroom, I set up to process the film, got my trays ready for development, turned off the lights, and ran my film from the developer to stop to fix and to rinse and then turned on the lights to see how these first sheets looked. As I did this I looked over to my right to see the remaining stack of sheets of exposed but undeveloped film sitting there on the counter underneath the enlarger. About 85 sheets of film: not back in their light-tight box, not protected from the light at all. All now blown.

That was a mistake made once and never again.

Of course, there are other categories of mistakes made over a long career: teaching mistakes, political and strategic mistakes, creative mistakes, exhibition mistakes, and a whole other category I won't go into here: personal mistakes.

For instance, very early in my career, I had a print accepted to a group show at MIT where Minor White ran the program. My image was accepted for exhibition by this great master. I felt honored that my image had passed before his eyes. The evening of the opening I arrived and started looking for my photograph only to find it prominently displayed, upside down!

One of the things all of us who are career artists do is promote a relationship with influential people. This means developing an association with curators, gallery directors, editors, art buyers, and, if working professionally, art directors. For me, this has meant repeatedly showing work often over years to museum curators.  Twice, in a big way, this has affected my career when a curator up and left after seeing my work over an extended period. One went from being a photo curator to the head of the museum while seeing my work once a year for several years. Then having said to me she was giving me a one-man show told me she was leaving to go into banking. All right. In working with her replacement I had a new just-out-of-grad-school curator.  I had someone assigned to show my work who had no understanding of it and no history of looking at my work over a period of years. The show was less powerful and persuasive because of this. 

One more: in making aerial photographs of the Cape and Martha's Vineyard one fall day I flew out of the Hyannis Airport in October at about 3 pm. The quantity of light in aerial work is paramount as you must work with a fast shutter speed combined with at least some depth of field. As it got later, I was losing light, raising my ISO and lowering my shutter speed.  Most of the files I shot that day were blurry. I try to make aerial photographs now in the morning when the light is increasing.

I have always found photography challenging, part of its appeal. There are so very many ways you can screw up. I would often tell students it wasn't the mistakes so much, it was the failure to learn from them that was tragic. There is something so inevitable and final in an image swooping onto your film or sensor. At some fast shutter opening of, say, 1/500 of a second, the image is fully formed, fixed as in stone. What are your chances that this is great? Very low. 

Let me finish with this: what is your intention with your work? And in that process are you specific and disciplined, methodically planning and calculating each step to achieve your goal? Or are you impulsive, working sporadically, haphazardly accruing disparate images over time? I suspect that most of us are a little of both, at times being careful and calculated and at others just picking up our camera and winging it. I would presume one goal would be to make fewer mistakes, and waste our limited time less. Perhaps some planning and forethought isn't such a bad thing?   

Being fluent and practiced is key, of course. The same camera, a known lens so that you can sublimate the gear and work without logistics and circumstances getting in your way. After all, you're trying to be clear-headed and perceptive. Make it as easy on yourself as you can by knowing what you're doing. Being a professional or a career photographer is a very different thing than being an amateur who picks up a camera only occasionally. Photography's hard, as you've read from me before. Figure out ways to make it work better for the materials and situations you find yourself in. Really good photography is made by people who have discipline and understand that this is work. Rewarding work and work that can be really fun, but work nevertheless.

Not the first time I've shown my work but a show of a different sort: The Poster Show

Hope to see you at the opening March 19, 4-6 pm.