It is a distinct pleasure to be able to announce the publication of something very special. The new book of the Oakesdale Series is just out, as it just arrived this week.

This is the first in a run of small books that are going be printed that showcase my vintage series work from the 1980's and 90's. Each book will have just one series, and will be numbered and signed by me.

The books will be small, 7 x 7 inches, modest and inexpensive but beautifully designed and printed. We are making an initial run of twelve separate books and will offer a slipcased box to hold them in.

Currently either in process or under consideration are the following series:

Hershey, PA

Yountville, CA

Nantucket, MA

Peddocks Island, MA

Old Trail Town, Cody, WY

Solothurn, CH

Moab, Utah

Chaco Canyon, NM

Northampton Fairgrounds, MA

Billings, MT

Thompson, CT

I can't express just how good they look. They are gorgeous. Oakesdale is now out and Hershey is in the final editing phase:

The books will be sold locally in the Boston area and also available online through my website.

If you're interested, please let us know (Neal's email). That way we'll know how many to print in subsequent printings. I believe earlier numbers in this limited edition project will be prized as collectors will want to get in early,  as well as lower numbers in the edition will be cheaper. Pricing will be tiered: the first 100 copies of each book will sell for $25 each, with shipping and handling added to that. The next 100 will increase in price and so on. Finally, you will be able to subscribe to all twelve books, receiving one after the other as they are published. Caution: don't order yet. Let us put in place the payment and shipping structure first so that we can get these books to you in a timely and efficient manner.

I like to think of these new books in this way: while most who follow my work will never get to see the original prints from these series, you can, for the cost of a few cups of coffee or a modest meal out, have a signed and numbered copy of a book that is elegant and dedicated to individual series, photographs that constitute seminal work from my career.

These are very beautiful books. Designed by Andrea Star Greitzer, a valued colleague, former student and key friend, Andrea is the force behind most of my publications and is responsible for any branding associated with my name and work.

We look forward to hearing from you.

This is another in the group of blogs I've been posting taking a look at series made but not seen. Well, mostly not seen. The Northampton Fairground pictures were made in 2001. In 2010 I did show some of them at an exhibit I had at Panopticon Gallery in Boston but I'd be willing to bet that few of you have seen them before.

The full series is on the site: here.

These stuck to a prescribed plan, well oiled by this time. Scout area to shoot, load up with several rolls of black and white film, hang light meter on strap around my neck, walk and photograph in a proportion of about 4:1, meaning overshoot and then in editing cut down to about 1 keeper to every 4 shot. 

By 2001 the future seemed clear to me. The days of my darkroom printing were numbered. The Fairground pictures are one of the last I made on film and printed with an enlarger using chemistry in my darkroom. While I would stick with shooting film for several more years I would soon be scanning and inkjet printing my pictures. 

Of course, snow to a landscape photographer presents opportunities and challenges. It tends to reduce content, emphasize what's above the horizon line and maximize form. These were made mid winter on another of countless "get in the car and drive looking for photographs to make" day trips, very often on Sundays if I was teaching during the week. Northampton is about 1 1/2 hours drive out the Mass Turnpike from where I live in Cambridge. Not being well known had its advantages. Most free days were just that, no conflict, no one calling, no gallery representing my work. Free time to work.

In all these years I've learned to give serious attention to any and all fairgrounds I come across, if I can get in. The Northampton Fairground is gated but on a Sunday morning with a fresh coat of snow, the gate was open. 

There was a little cemetery along the back edge of the fairgrounds that got my attention.

This is what Mark Feeney, one of the Boston Globe's photography reviewers, wrote about the above picture:

When a Rantoul photograph includes any effect other than the most straightforward, the result can be ravishing. A picture of the Northampton Fairgrounds shows a tree in snow, an image of almost Zen spareness, yet cropped in such a way that a delicate tracery of shadows from the branches fills much of the photograph.

The words by Feeney have helped me through far leaner and meaner times. Thank you, Mark.

I continued to play with angles, the snow and bright sunlight helping here, removing the ground and allowing work with the shadows.

Hope to see you then.

This is the fourth Southwestern series I've written about and the last from the time period of the mid to late 90's.

The full series is: here.

If you liked the others, Chaco Canyon, Bartlett's Wash and Moab then you 'll like this one too. If you didn't then you have one more to suffer through.

Bluff is a very small town on the southern edge of Utah in the southeastern corner of the state below Moab. It is mostly rock. I found these pictures while on a driving loop that was long and hot, stopping in Bluff to relieve myself but also on the hunt for pictures. I pulled over and took a short walk up a tight canyon far enough to see that I would need to climb to get to where the petrogylphs were. I'd been told back in town where to go. I went back to the car to gear up. In those days several rolls of Plus X  2 1/4  film on a belt pouch, a Pentax Spotmeter on a strap around my neck, and, in this case, hiking boots for traction that were also better protection if there were rattlesnakes, bottled water and a sandwich bought in town shoved in a backpack.  No tripod needed here as it was bright sun. Finally, a note on the dash of the locked rented car saying who and where I was. And, oh yes, the Hasselblad Superwide in my right hand.

Climb up to a ridge, traverse it, then climb again over a small lip to higher ground that was like being on a plateau.

Let's pause here as presumably we're going on to more incessant pictures of rock and sky made in the American Southwest. All true. We are. How can someone do this? Stand in front of some rock in a barren landscape of rock and point a camera at it and trip the shutter? What possible reason would there be for doing this?

Presumably, we're going somewhere. Whereas a single photograph might be nice,  it would really say very little. But put many together, take us somewhere, give us a narrative and the sheer reductiveness of the landscape might actually be used to make a point or to at least convey a broader and deeper sense of place and, in this case, the special nature of this place.

Is this just some middle aged New Englander white guy with a camera reacting to this most unusual of landscapes, responding to the differences between home and here? God, I hope not. Remember, by this time this kind of place is not new for me, this photographing in the Southwest. 

After a few more we arrive here:

which begins to get us somewhere very specific. There have been people here and a very long time ago.

There is also a landscape bizarre and unique. No tourists, not on the map or at the end of a trail, no attraction. This made me feel unique, privileged to be in what turned out to be something of a sacred space.

Here we are, finally, to a line of antelope or deer scratched out of the rock face how many years ago?

Sitting there, year after year, right there on a moonless night in February, with snow drifted up against the base of the wall or baking in the August sun, season after season. To, finally our own more present form of lasting, of preserving something of ourselves long after we are gone:

I remember being so offended at the discovery, from petroglyphs cherished for being authentic and a window into an honorable past to graffiti, the most recent carved into the rock just a few years ago, "DDRA or DORA 2-21-93", as though one was to be preserved and honored and the newer reviled as crude markings by teenagers clueless to our national heritage.

How did I end the Bluff Utah series? With this:

which was a symbol for me of both the real place, this ineffable shrine with something man made in the shape of a circle on the rock floor.

In the last scene in the wonderful 1982 movie "Blade Runner"directed by Ridley Scott and starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, a "replicant" whose time has run out says, "I've seen things..."

I too have seen things. 

This is another Southwest series and the third as I run through my catalog of works made but not seen, at least by most of you.

The full  series is now on the site: here.

I did have a show of these in the building I taught in at Northeastern University. The atrium at the entrance on the ground floor had glass cases. It was used for faculty and students to have shows in them. Here is the signage, complete with a typo, that hung as the introduction to the Bartlett's Wash work:

The series starts off with these two, pointing down.

These are 1,2,3 in the series and you can tell I am working at shaking things up in the first two by denying the horizon. Then comes

a large subset of horizon and sky pictures, used to counter the first two, getting more reductive as they progress.

And then next to the rock itself which is so phenomenal:

Then to numbers 13 and 14 in the series, where I tried to present the issue of scale by making a frame then shooting my sneakers in the next one:

While this was meant to be amusing, of course, I also now look at the pair of them as being a real comment on abstraction and how photography can take things out of context and distort real things.

I do this less now that I am much older but I wasn't against making pictures then that were about making pictures. I wasn't an artist that shied away from process, as many do. It was okay by me that you could see that I was standing there camera in hand making a picture. I am no purist. In fact in this series I put myself right in there in the last frame:

I believe I came to terms with that as a student when I noticed Robert Frank reflected back from the barber's window in the "The Americans" or Lee Friedlander's shadow in the empty store front window. I am big these days on what gives one "permission" to do something. Well, those pictures and others gave me permission to put myself in this series.

Note: the blog is going to take a look at several series works I made in the late 90's and early 2000's that haven't been on the site before.  I stopped working this way in 1984 and then took it up again in 1996. 

Chaco Canyon. Ever been? Know where and what it is? Chaco Canyon is Anasazi Indian ruins about a 3 1/2 hours drive due west from Santa Fe, NM. It is is what is left of a large complex of dwellings abandoned by the Anasazi Indians as they retreated for unknown reasons in about the twelfth century. They were thriving, building, farming and then they were gone by the end of the twelfth century. A real mystery. Theories abound with the most plausible being a drought that forced the tribe to head north, to become nomadic after more than 500 years in this one valley. 

I've been many times and have even spent the night there, sleeping under the stars. Made pictures there too. 

My series starts off with this one of the large great house called Chetro Ketl, but quickly leaves it as I headed up a trail that carves through the cliff face to arrive at the top looking out on the canyon below and the plateau above it.

Petroglyphs are common here.

Chaco Canyon is strikingly beatuful, accessed by traveling on a dirt road that closes when it rains, hidden away in a valley on a plateau in the desert. It's a mysterious place, filled with ghosts of a time long  gone, of a vibrant community and highly civilized society that simply left and vanished.

Let me provide some context. I made the Chaco Canyon series in 1998. This series came a couple of years after I made the Portland, Maine series (here) and a year after the Oakeksdale Cemetery one in 1997 (here). I was back in the business of making series work after a spell of 12 years or so. I'd concentrated during those years on working in 8 x 10.  That work was far more incidental (individual photographs intended to stand on their own as opposed to sequenced and ordered bodies of work). This was a very prolific time for me as the Oakesdale Cemetery series introduced me to many new ways of making pictures in sequence. My idea behind what the narrative form was also changed during this time. I was seeking now to expand an understanding of a place into many pictures but also to be more directorial as well. Chaco Canyon conforms both to earlier ways of putting pictures next to pictures but also extends it by being a highly specific and intentional journey that was mine alone.

The full Chaco Canyon series is on the site: here

The series concludes with this picture above, carved into the rock floor of the cliff  above the Anasazi dwellings. I was photographing here on a far more subliminal level, trying to convey a sense of a past civilization and a collective intelligence that was staggering. Imagine leaving the home you grew up in but also the whole city around you leaving too.

For me the concept is to imbue my pictures with something of, yes, the place where we are, but also of our perception and emotional reaction to where we are. This is what is missing from so very much of the landscape work we see on line these days. I've written before about "special places", where we find some visceral and personal connection to some place where we are, whether it is something like Chaco Canyon, or something closer and more privately held.

I urge you, if interested, to come to  555 Gallery in Boston to see the prints.

As always, I am very appreciative of your taking the time to look at my work and to read my thoughts about it.