A few weeks ago while I was out photographing in the wheat field country called The Palouse in Washington I wrote a post that challenged readers to find a gravestone in a cemetery in Oakesale, WA with the gravemarker "Waldo"

Here's the post:   Here's the Deal

I wrote then that anyone that finds the headstone gets a print from the Oakesdale series from me as the prize.

Well, drumroll please, we have a winner!

It is Susan Nalband from 555 Gallery. 

I know what you're thinking, "Isn't this the gallery Neal shows his work with?"

Yes, it is but I swear this is not a fixed contest. Out of the blue Susan sent me an email this morning:

How about that?

Of course, she didn't actually go out there and walk around the cemetery to prove she   found it. But she did something better, she found the story behind the marker. 

WALDO ALVIN NOLTING died when he was 28 years old and he was single. I wonder what that story is? Farm accident, disease, ill health from serving in WW I?

Thank you, Susan. Please get in touch soon to claim your print, any of your choice from the Oakesdale Series. 

Congratulations!

And thank you Mr. Nolting. It is sad you died so young. If there is anything at all after we die, you should know that you lie in a most beautiful spot, on the side of a hill, surrounded by wheat fields and with a tree over you for shade from the summer's heat.

http://nealrantoul.com/posts/oakesdale-cemetery

which is the first

then:

http://nealrantoul.com/posts/oakesdale-cemetery-take-2

then:

http://nealrantoul.com/posts/oakesdale-cemetery-take-3

and finally:

http://nealrantoul.com/posts/oakesdale-cemetery-take-4

Why now? Why ask you to take a longer look at a series made almost 20 years ago?

Because I just did. I went back yesterday. Most years when I am here in Eastern Washington I go back to the cemetery in Oakesdale, to see what has stayed the same and what has changed. I also check on what I think of as "Rob's tree"... this one:

(Please, no criticism of the second photograph, as inelegant as the black and white is, well, elegant.)

So moving to walk around this most essential of places layered over with a meaning so personal and so powerful for me that it is perhaps best just to show your some of what I saw yesterday as words fail me.

Thanks for reading. As always you may reach me with comments,  criticism, etc at:

Neal's email

I wonder if you photograph where you live. Of course, if you shoot still lifes you may very well photograph where you live in your studio. But if you shoot outdoors, do you walk the streets in your neighborhood and photograph close to home? I don't. In fact, I don't really know my neighborhood that well. I'm not a walker, I don't have a  dog and I drive or bike most everywhere (I know, driving everywhere is not so politically correct these days). 

But, in 1994 I did something very different for me. I made a series of photographs in Cambridge, MA where I live that, although they were not in my immediate neighborhood, were made not far away on the other side of town. 

I also made them using the 8 x 10 inch view camera. Imagine someone walking around your neighborhood with a huge view camera on a tripod, plunking it down in front of your house, going underneath a black cloth and fiddling with things, the  guy probably muttering to himself, pointing a  gun-like thing at the house and making some adjustments to the lens in the front of the camera, inserting some big flat black thing in the back of the camera, pulling out a slide of some sort, pushing a cable release and then reinserting the slide, throwing the camera over his shoulder and moving on down the street, only to repeat the same process in front of someone else's house. OMG! Call 911! While this is now 20 years ago, I can safely say no one bothered me the whole time. Before September 2001 people were far less worried about stuff like what I was doing.

Over three weeks in the fall of 1994 I did just that, while teaching and going to my ever present meetings. I was working at this project. This was a brief but intense time to make a series, particularly with the big camera. This was also a time I was not making my regular series work, as I'd sold the camera I used for these to buy the 8 x 10 ten years before. And for the all the reasons described in the paragraph above, I didn't use the 8 x 10 to make series work.

Except in Cambridge in the fall of 1994.

Since the project was close by, I did shoot and then have film processed while I was working on this new series. This was not typical for me in those days, to be able to track what I was doing while I was doing it. So often I'd be in Italy or across the country someplace, making pictures. We take this for granted now, of course, with screens on the back of our cameras and our laptop computers nearby. While I don't like the camera screens much, I really like seeing my work at the end of a long shooting day on the screen of my laptop, wherever I am.

At any rate, the Cambridge Series I made in 1994 was a very big deal in Neal's world. It was really good work, if I do say so, but exceptionally quiet in that these weren't flashy pictures, in fact, so quiet and unassuming it is almost as though the photographer and the process weren't there. The prints are 24 x 20 inches, larger than most series work either preceding these or following them. They are black and white darkroom prints that are archivally  processed, painstakingly developed in trays and finished in a selenium toner bath. I made these with Ilford's XP1 film, a black and white chromogenic film (meaning it was a monochromatic color negative film processed in color chemistry). Much of the  80's and 90's Ilford sponsored my 8 x 10 work with great quantities of film as I was known as a "field tester" for the company.

This characteristic of the "art" being subdued and the content coming through loud and clear is a core value of mine in much of my photography, particularly in much of the 8 x 10 work. What if the tool you used to make your art was so good, so clear, with such high fidelity that it, in effect, went away? What if what it rendered was so there, so present that there was really no obstacle to your viewing the thing being shown? What if the point was just that, to show and really derive the sheer facts sitting there on the print right in front of you? In effect that this content and clarity was actually the art? What if the tool used became not important or seemingly not significant as it left no apparent signature? That fantastic transparency or neutrality is a major reason why I lugged that thing around for over 20 years. 

As the actual prints are 20 x 24 inches the size allows you to see all the subtlety inherent in the image. I was just teaching this principle to a student at Penland two weeks ago but, in a photograph like the one above, I used the Scheimpflug principle to contain sharpness along the oblique angle of the face of this building.

When I finished these I began to show them around but not many people got them. They were simply too quiet and too ordinary-looking to pique much interest. In those years I was showing a young curator from Harvard work every couple of years or so. Deborah Martin Kao is now the Head Curator of the Harvard Art Museums. But then she was simply the curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at Harvard's Fogg Museum. When I showed her the work she got them and, after careful consideration while looking at other series, decided to buy two of them. As I wanted a more complete representative selection of the series, I donated two prints from the series at the same time.

Thank you, Debi. Good choice.

Besides all the technical and logistical facts about this series, there is the larger point to be made that the work resides in the time in which it was made, a product of my aesthetic back then and the realization that by pointing my camera where I did I made choices and preferences. By this, I mean that the final prints are their own justification. To take pictures of the everyday and commonplace and render that content with such fidelity that things can be seen that would not be noticed if we were standing in front of the real thing is its own just cause.

Very few got this, but this work represented my effort to ask us to look at the medium itself, partly as validation of its remarkable abilities but also to question how it sees our world.

When the Fogg reopens this fall after a three-year complete gut and remake renovation you should be able to see the prints the museum acquired. How do you do this? Call ahead and ask to see the 4 Rantoul prints from Cambridge in the permanent collection. And let me know what you think.

Perhaps because I am a senior photographic  person I find I have been thinking about the concept of what pictures we make at what periods in our lives. Looking at something I made in my mid 20's (Take Me Back) and comparing it to something I made recently (Spring and Fall) I can safely say that there was no way I could build a structure around a body of work back then like I do now. It was far simpler when I was young.

Photography was a lot simpler back then too. Besides all the technical changes photography has had, it is a medium much more aware of itself now than it was in the mid 70's. We know more about it and what it can and cannot do than we did then. It would have to be, after all that we've seen coming out of it in the past 40 years.

Of course, what perspective does someone have at 20 years old? Certainly little on himself/herself, but for most people none on much of anything. 

This then leads me to the core concept: making art that is age appropriate. By age appropriate I really mean something a little larger, that it is emotionally and intellectually age appropriate. Can this be boiled down to developmental changes? i.e. when we are younger we make work that is impulsive, reactive, intuitive, often simpler, emotional and self centered. When we are older we make work that is contemplative, intellectual, considered, knowledgeable, refined, careful. Simple enough, right? I mean that we should use what we've got and at my age I have a great deal I can use for I've been doing this so long. On the other hand, I can't go out and on an impulse make a huge body of work of a brand new idea, putting life and limb at risk and hang over the edge, so to speak. While I am physically constrained due to my age, I just can't because I don't think that way now.

As usual, I am thinking of a photograph I made that references my point. This below is at the Grand Coullee Dam in Washington.

I made this in the 80's. I am standing at the top of the dam with the tripod of the 8 x 10 view camera leaning up against the wall and the camera tilted over the wall and pointing straight down. My left foot is pushed up against the back tripod leg, keeping the camera from plummeting down the dam into the water and I have stretched myself tall as I can to see up at the ground glass to focus the image under the dark cloth before inserting the film holder to take the picture. This is high risk stuff. This is a photograph made a long time ago.Would I do this now? I think you know the answer.

Finally, how does one take a passion that is still as deep and resonate as it was when  younger and make art that is relevant and meaningful today? There is a catch, of course, and that is to not make the same pictures over and over again. Without moving on and relegating our done work to past work we fall into one of many traps, but the trap of repetition is to be avoided at all costs. Move on!

Also, as a rule it appears that later work may be as ambitious as earlier work but perhaps more thought through, in that the artist seeks to use the materials to his/her purpose as a device to make the point. In earlier years I would come across a place or an area and think to make a series of pictures from it that could compose a whole, be it a story or a thread or a concept. I would photograph the place, putting all my eggs into one basket, to focus whatever insight I had into a cohesive group of pictures to make a complete set in a short period of time. While I still do that occasionally, much of my work now is done over longer periods of time, with perhaps multiple shoots to get to the end. Slower because of being older? Yes, partly, but also slower  because I am aware of more things going on, more subtleties inherent in something I am photographing.

So, are you making pictures now that are symphonic? Large in scale, grand and extroverted? Or are you making more modest pieces, intimate and reflective, emotional and heartfelt? And does age play a role here?

I for one am still making the latter but am also involved in larger pieces too, assembled bodies of works that span time and often place. Why? Because I am thinking less and less of single pictures existing on their own. Maybe laying out and making books has taught me ways of connecting pictures to pictures more. At any rate, I am now involved in three larger series:

a look at Massachusetts Route 2 as it heads from the suburbs west of Boston to the border with New York State in three parts.

Hofsos Trilogy:

a look at the small town of Hofsos, Iceland from inside and outside perspectives.

and Spring and Fall, a body of work of Martha's Vineyard that encompasses pictures made of the same area made on the ground and also made from the air:

Not to get morbid, but there is the phenomenon of classical composers final and unfinished bodies of work becoming their own requiems after they are gone: Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler and Faure' to name a few. You probably know others. 

Just saying.

The right picture at the right time.

Big Topic:  

It might even be the biggest we have as photographers working digitally. I know it was huge when I was teaching. How do you edit the work? How do you deal with a large quantity of images? How can you be effective and consistent when confronted with hundreds or perhaps thousands of images you've created? The ratios are staggering. An example: usually when I go up to shoot aerially, I hire a pilot for a one hour flight. In that one hour I typically take about 400 pictures.The final portfolio that results from that one hour flight needs to be under 25 prints. 

This is a large enough topic to warrant several posts. Before I go into how I work with over 400 frames at a time let's go back a bit and look at the older and more established workflow from analog days.

I had a couple of ways I dealt with many pictures. In roll films which, for me, was usually 120mm and occasionally 35mm, I made contact sheets. Often I would set up the darkroom for just a session of getting myself up to date on making contact  sheets. I wouldn't worry too much about too dark or too light or too contrasty or too flat. I would simply make the contact print so that the most images on the sheet were viewable and reasonably exposed. Contact sheets were a compromise, of course. After a session like that I would usually bring them home with me. At home, with a beer in hand, I would sit in a chair and look at them with good light over my shoulder and maybe a magnifying loupe to see them better. Over several sessions I would mark off with a Sharpie pen the ones I wanted to print. These would then serve as the guide for printing when back in the darkroom. Remember the contact sheets were the first time I was seeing what pictures I'd made as positives, close to what they would look like when enlarged.

Sound systematic? Well, it was. My whole career I have made a huge quantity of pictures. I had to have some way to edit these down into a manageable number. 

In the mid 80's I started working in the 8 x 10 format. This changed my "proofing" process quite a bit. For the first few years working this way, I made contact prints of each negative that I developed. This was because I had no 8 x 10 enlarger. 

You can clearly this in the example from the series "Mount Auburn Cemetery" as the shape of the negative along the edges tells you it is from 8 x 10 film. So, from these contact prints from the big negatives I would move on to making the final prints, as contact prints. This changed when I started enlarging the 8 x 10 negative a few years years later and, to be truthful, I seldom contact printed the 8 x 10 anymore. It was so big I could read it well enough by placing it on a light table. 

All of that system worked reasonably well as the years flowed on. I was working in black and white, I had a manageable system in place, I could edit a roll or several rolls of film down to a reasonable number to print, or take a day's shooting of 8 x 10 film of 15 or 20 frames and print the ones that worked. I would store the contact sheets made, sometimes with notes on them, with the developed film. I wrote printing notes on the plastic sleeves used to store the negatives right over the frame printed so that if I needed to print it again I'd have a head start.

#9 was  48 seconds at f8 and using a # 2 1/2 filter. This meant I would expose the paper for 48 seconds, having set the aperture on the lens on the enlarger for f8 and would have put a  #2 1/2 magenta colored filter into a filter drawer above the lens to control contrast. That was he baseline for making another print later.

Final note on analog editing: somehow it all looks okay to me: manageable, a serviceable system. In Editing 2 I will bring us into the "threshold " years, that time when many of us were working in a hybrid manner. While still shooting film and processing it ourselves, we had begun scanning our negatives, working on the files in early versions of Photoshop, towards making some sort of print and, within a few years, inkjet prints.

Stay tuned, as it should be riveting.