AERIALS WHEAT 2016
Reserve flight out to Spokane from Boston: check
Reserve rental car: check
Reserve cottage in Moscow, Idaho: check
Ship gyro stabilizer out ahead of time: check
Get camera sensor cleaned: check
Pack: check
Fly and arrive
Shoot for several days with it raining on and off waiting for good weather: check
Reserve plane from Doug Gadwa, pilot I fly with: check
Day of aerials fly with door off in back seated next to large opening, camera in hand, preset to the right shutter speed (fast), gyro spinning at 21000 rpm to stabilize the camera, harnessed in but able to lean out and point straight down (Jesus! scary), shoot 516 frames in one hour: check
All that for one hour's shooting? Seems crazy, doesn't it? This is a "discretionary " trip, meaning I am not on assignment, no one's paying me to come out here, not on any grant. Most won't even know I've gone.
Ah, but then this happens:
Which, for me, makes it all worthwhile.
BTW: looking at these on your brand new super iPhone 7 will only lead you to surmise that the photographs are nice but not "special." That will be the wrong conclusion. Check this out below. You can see real prints soon, the weekend after the elections. After what we've all been through you may need something aesthetically pleasing to sooth your soul.
Coming up:
Open Studios in Allston at 119 Braintree Street, Allston November 12 and 13 from 12-6 both days. I will be there and the studio will be open. As I get home this Thursday I will make prints of some of these for that weekend. Hope you can come.
Related series
Wheat 2014 Form
Artist Statement: Wheat
Neal Rantoul
I first started photographing in the Palouse area of southeastern Washington in the mid 90’s and have been back most years since. It is my longest running project.
The work has evolved over the years, going from first black and white to color, from large format to digital, and from being based on the ground to including pictures made from the air. I have also photographed the area through the seasons.
In earlier writing about the project I referenced some of the great contemporary landscape photographers such as Robert Adams and Joe Deal, who was a good friend, and also cited Eugene Atget for the single mindedness of his intent. As a career artist I work in many different genres but this is the one that is perhaps the core vehicle of expression for my landscape work. While it has been challenging to find new approaches to this most wonderful of places, it also has been a privilege. Looking back at so much work now, I see more subtle changes from the earlier days to the present for I believe some of the basic principles in working there still apply: it is a landscape almost without scale due to few trees and little to reference size, the pictures can convey the movement of the wheat in the breeze at the same time as show the stillness and static nature of the topography, allowing photographs that convey sharpness and blur due to movement in the same image simultaneously and finally, in the more recent work since about 2000, colors, on their own, but also in relationship to each other.
I am very excited by the newest work from the summer of 2014, as it represents a shift in intention with an evolved sense of the fields' function and their form where the work is perhaps its most abstract. Some of this work references the place by including a barn, a farm machine or trees, while some does not. Hence: Function and Form, the title for the new work. Function and Form constitutes a subset, which is, I hope, a powerful one, of the overall work made over the two-week shoot.
Neal Rantoul
July 2014
Wheat 2012
New Wheat
These photographs are some of the work from a trip in late July/early August to Pullman, Washington to shoot wheat. An exhibition of some of the pictures shown here and a few others not on this site were in a show at the Danforth Museum in Framingham, MA April, 2013.
As in the other work on the website from this large area called " The Palouse" in southeastern Washington , I now make these both on the ground and from the air.
Wheat, Washington 2010
I have been photographing in this southeastern corner of Washington for over fifteen years. The area, called “The Palouse” is hundreds of square miles of wheat, lentils, safflower. etc. I first began making pictures here in black and white 8 x 10 in the 90’s, then added color in 2000, beginning to work aerially about the same time and now make all my pictures digitally. I also return in different seasons as the landscape changes drastically depending on what stage the crops are in. As there is so much work from this area, we have chosen to show work from several different trips or shoots and to change them out from time to time. The group shown here is from a trip I made in August 2010.
