Nantucket 2010
Long time since my last post. Mid-summer now.
Long, hot, and bright summer days. A family reunion on Martha's Vineyard last week with a graveside speech at the family plot in Chilmark eulogizing my sister who died two years ago.
I've been spending most days in the new studio enjoying its solitude and its central air.
In 2010 I made a set of pictures from Nantucket on a visit to see friends. This way of working-walking, looking, positioning myself, wide lens, black and white, flat gray daylight-an often practiced system well-oiled over the years.
Started really with Fences and Walls 1979 but polished and fully realized with the Nantucket pictures from 1980:
©Neal Rantoul 1980
Of course, it makes for an unusual shoot, holding one set of pictures in your mind while shooting the same way in the same place 30 years later.
Clearly, the same but different.
Nantucket 1980: Hasselblad Super Wide. Plus X film and not printed till three months later. My career ahead of me. The next year I would marry and start the tenure track job at Northeastern. These pictures an epiphany, showing a path for a whole lifetime.
Nantucket 2010: Nikon D3X, 14-24 mm Nikkor Free as a bird, wrapping up a teaching career of almost 40 years, soon to retire.
Photography is firmly established in a digital realm.
Apologies for going there but my ex-wife, Micaela Garzoni, died suddenly a few weeks ago, at 66 years old. For a brief time, she was into photography, studying at the New England School of Photography and then getting her Master's degree at MIT. The next year she showed her thesis work at the ICA (Institute for Contemporary Art). My daughter Maru and granddaughter Skye struggling to deal with the loss. Hard to lose a parent.
Have I hit a chord? Tell me: nrantoul@comcast.net
Related series
Nantucket, Massachusetts 1980
The Nantucket pictures are the first “series” I did. Made, over 30 years ago, it is amazing that making this one modest group of pictures began a whole career.
I was teaching a summer photography workshop on the island of Martha’s Vineyard and took the students on a field trip to Nantucket for the day for a change of pace. When the ferry landed, I told the students to go make pictures and I would see them late in the afternoon to head back to Martha’s Vineyard. Off they went and so did I.
I had no real idea that something major was going to happen but it was one of those times when much of the work I had done until then was preparing me for how I would photograph that day. It was right: the light, the scale, the camera, my seeing, my effort to try to make a group of pictures that would connect to each other in a specific sequence to make a whole that was larger than its individual parts. After a few hours and several rolls of film I knew I’d had a breakthrough and broke down in tears when telling my experience to a friend on the ferry ride back home. Several months later the prints were finished and the next year they were shown in a summer group show at Light Gallery in NYC and in a one-man show at the RI School of Design Museum in Providence, RI. But more important to me was that I had found a way to make pictures that still serves me well today.
Related blog posts
Nantucket 1980 Part 1
Nantucket 1980 Part 2
Nantucket 1980 Part 3
