Best of 2014
For this end of the year look at the best of 2014 I have decided to choose one photograph from each month. Can you imagine? I am not looking for sympathy here but out of the thousands upon thousands of pictures I have made this past year for someone who works primarily in series this has proven to be almost impossible task.
What did I do? I just plunged in. I spent several hours just going through what I'd shot. If you photograph a lot, try it. There probably are as many interpretations of what you did this past year as there are photographs you made, but it is a worthwhile and challenging exercise.
Here we go:
January: from Nantucket, visiting friends.
February: I was staying in Santa Rosa about 1 1/2 hours north of San Francisco and drove back east over the mountains to photograph in the Central Valley. This was from the air.
March: I made three large bodies of work while in California last winter. I photographed the rock formations called "Tafoni" along the coast, made aerial photographs inland and made pictures of skate parks, this one in Healdsburg.
April: by April I was back home and began photographing at a place called Costume World in Fitchburg, MA. Wigs, masks, some mannequins. This work will be shown at 555 Gallery in September, 2015.
May: I was back on Martha's Vineyard. This is one I make often, with a very long lens. It is of the clay cliffs at Aquinnah (Gay Head).
June: By then I was at Penland in North Carolina teaching. This is from the town Marion nearby.
July: I returned to The Palouse to photograph wheat, near Pullman, WA. This from the air.
August: in Boston, from my bike, near Fenway Park.
September: From the National Museum of Medicine and Health in Maryland.
October: back at Martha's Vineyard. This one from the tip of the small island Chappaquidick from the air.
November: I was in Europe and friends took me up to their place on the side of a mountain in the Italian Alps.
December: from Somerville, back home again.
I had a very good year. In this period of my life I have no job to go to and few requirements or demands placed upon me. Making art resides in the center of all I do; my activity, my travel, my thoughts, my concentration, my wishes. This is a remarkable gift, of course, that I can do this, and I try to not take any of it for granted, as it is completely what I have always wanted throughout my long career. To be free to make pictures like this is a sincere privilege. I hope some of my own experiences can benefit you in yours. I enjoy sharing my work with you and hope you enjoy looking at my photographs.
I wish you the very best in this coming year, 2015.
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 2014 Function
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 aerial 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
