Another in a series taking a look at some of the tools I have used to make my pictures over the years. Last month I did a couple of posts on the Rollei SL66. Next up we're going to look at the Hasselblad Superwide (SWC). The SWC is a camera that has a rich tradition across many types of photography. Developed in the 1950's to fit a very special lens made by Karl Zeiss to a camera  body, it was a camera made to accommodate a lens rather than the other way around. It was also completely unique in the Hasselblad line of cameras and, indeed, across all of photography.

The camera used a fixed 38mm f3.5 Carl Zeiss Biogon lens, in a 120mm square format that used interchangeable backs. As it had no mirror, it was viewfinder-based with focusing determined by guessing the distance then setting the feet on the barrel of the lens. It had no meter, no electronics at all. It was also very small due to having no mirror so it really was a one-handed camera.

I had two of them. The first one I bought used in 1978 (from Phil Levine) and then sold it in 1984 to buy an 8 x 10 view camera. By 1996 I was back into one and bought it new. By this time its price had become very high and the body had been revised slightly.

What pictures did I make with it? 

What pictures didn't I make with it! 

It was the primary camera I used to make series work, my main vehicle of expression over my whole career. Here are a few, searchable on the gallery page of my site:

Nantucket

Yountville

Boston (in infrared)

Solothurn

Portland ( with a blog post explaining the pictures here) 

Newtown

Summerhill

Old Trail Town

Hersheyand on and on. All the photographs from the monograph published in 2006 : American Series

were made with the camera except for the wheat pictures, which were made with the 8 x 10.

Why was the camera so special? Quite simply it was the lens. 38mm on the 2 1/4 format is roughly equivalent to 25mm in 35mm. So this was a very wide lens. But it also was unique in that it fell off very little in sharpness and exposure in the corners and if kept level (hence the bubble level built into the finder) straight lines would stay straight. Plus, the lens was very sharp. The print of the boys on the dock from the Nantucket series is sitting downstairs at my home and is 43 inches square. It is very sharp.

Advanced students would occasionally approach me about this camera, thinking, if they liked my pictures, they might like to own a Superwide. Besides the obstacle of the camera's cost (about $5000!) the SWC was a highly specialized tool for making photographs. I would explain that this camera wasn't any kind of all-purpose tool to make pictures with. You had to be able to move in close to your subject and any work with an extremely wide-angle lens is always exacting. This usually discouraged them. I got so that I could guess the distance pretty well as there was no way to precisely check the focus except using the company's ground glass adapter. This was more for studio photographers and perhaps for some architectural work but it was cumbersome in the field. I would say 90% of the work I did with the camera was handheld. But over the years I got to know what I could and could not do with it. When it was the right tool for the job it was simply amazing. 

I don't know if people have the same degree of connectedness with their cameras these days or not. And I generally don't like to attribute huge importance to the tool used to make our art. But the SWC and I were figuratively connected at the hip. I still am in awe at what it allowed me to do, make pictures that span over 25 years of my career that are as close to me as anything I have ever done, seminal works that formed the basis for my practice. Finally, I learned much of the methodology from it that I still use today when I photograph, though I am now working exclusively with digital cameras. 

This is a 903 SWC, like the model I owned. I sold mine a few years ago.

The last version of the camera was called the 905 SWC. Hasselblad stopped making the camera in  2005. Odd but this last one has a reputation of being the worst in all the years the camera was made. Hasselblad was required to change some of the chemicals they used for environmental reasons to make their lenses and the new formulation made the lens less sharp.

Other people that used or use it? Lee Friedlander comes to mind and Harry Callahan made many of his beach pictures with one, using a 645 back instead of the square.

As you know, my work is represented by 555 Gallery in Boston. Want to see any of the above portfolios? Just ask.

I don't usually write about equipment but the Rollei SL66 was such an important camera for me and many others I think it is appropriate. Plus, I just gave one of my two Sl66's away. 

This from the site Rolleiflex SL66

First single lens 6x6 camera by Rolleiflex: the SL66

They conceived a camera based on the construction elements of a studio camera, with the focusing rail on the left side. This was done so photographers accustomed to Rollei Twin Lens Reflex cameras would feel comfortable to find all operating elements in the same places: focusing on the left side, film advance and shutter release on the right side. Weiss and Prochnow had the camera ready, in time for the 1966 Photokina photographic fair in Cologne. Hence the name of the camera, SL66 for 1966 and 6x6, the size of the negatives.

At the time, development of the camera had cost Rollei about 3.5 million German Marks, which, at today's value, would be more than $ 10 million. A very large amount of money for a small company like Rollei this is, and shows how dedicated Rollei was to this new 'super Rolleiflex'.
The SL 66 consists of almost 1,000 single parts, all metal with the exception of only about 10 plastic parts (apart from the leatherette covers).

The Rollei SL 66 with the 40 mm Distagon lens and the grip which helped in hand holding

I bought mine in 1971. In those days, photographers wanting to step up in format from 35mm and still be able to hand hold would look to 2 1/4 (120mm) for higher quality due to the larger negative. Twin lens reflex cameras were made by Yashica, Rollei, and Mamiya. Single lens reflex cameras were made by Hasselblad, Bronica, Mamiya and Pentax. Photographers' highest quality choice was Hasselblad. With Carl Zeiss lenses, superb build quality and a reasonable size the Blad was expensive and a system camera. You could work with different models, format backs, reflex finders, add on meters and a long list of lenses, all at high cost. It was used on space missions by NASA, microscopy, National Geographic and countless studio photographers all over the world. You get the picture: Hasselblad was the Leica of 2 1/4 cameras. Many people think Hasselblad is a German camera. But it's not. The lenses are of German design but the camera is made in Sweden.

But the Rollei represented another step up in the line of available 2 1/4 SLR's for it was designed to do many more things than the Hasselblad. 

In the spring of 1971 I had just been accepted to the RI School of Design for study in the graduate photography MFA program. Harry Callahan had been my teacher for the junior and senior years at RISD and had a Rollei. (If you don't know about Callahan and his photography I recommend searching for it on line.) He was making wonderful prints off of negatives shot with the camera and I was looking at buying one, with an 80mm Zeiss Planar, a right angle prism finder and the grip. But I was concerned about the cost. If I remember right this was adding up to about $2000 that I didn't have. I went to Harry and explained I'd bought whole cars for a lot less than that. He asked me if I was serious about making pictures over my career. No one had ever asked me this in such a straight forward way. I answered, "yes." He said $2000 was very little to pay for something that could serve a lifetime, for a tool that I would make my pictures with, pictures that had a place in my heart for me and perhaps others as well. I decided on the spot. I ordered one, had it shipped to a friend's parents in Worcester to avoid the sales tax and waited for what seemed like forever. As soon as they called I jumped in the car and drove right up there from Providence. When I got it I was in heaven, reading the manual, dismantling it, playing with focus and it's tilt function.

The Rollei SL 66  showing the camera's tilt function

Yes, it could tilt its lens 6 degrees up and 6 degrees down. Big difference from the Hasselblad which was always fixed in parallel to its lenses. As I was working on a senior thesis project I began running film through it and making prints for class. But I couldn't get a sharp picture out of it. My classmates thought it was a bad lens so I sent it off to Rollei in New Jersey. It took about a month to get it back and Rollei said all was well. More tests and the same problem. This went on for a while, with me feeling like I'd spent way too much money for something that wasn't any good. No way was I doing the thesis with this camera as the pressure was on to make the final prints. So I shot it with one of the school's 4 x 5's.

Finally we shook loose what was going on. The focusing screen, which is removable on the SL66, was in its housing upside down. Lots of people were handling this camera when I received it as I was the first in school to own one and we never did know if it came that way,  or if someone mistakenly reversed it or if I did. This meant I was focusing on a different plane than where the film resided in the film back therefore guaranteeing blurry results.  All became right with the world when I turned the screen over and shot and processed film. Bingo! I can still remember what that was like. I was in the word of clarity, transparency, depth and sharpness. Life became really really good again.

By the time I started graduate study the next fall I was making pictures that were right up there with my classmates and my expectations for the camera were fulfilled. Odd to think that the tool we use holds such significance in the manner of the work we make but it does. Photography has always been reliant on its tools, its technology. For some the camera is everything. But Harry Callahan taught me that it was important to use the best device you could afford, that this after all, was your work and that the tools we use needed to be bought in awareness to their intended purpose. The best paint brushes, the best and most permanent oils.  An enlarger that is rigid and stable. An enlarging lens that is faithful to the clarity and sharpness of the negative.These days the computer and storage that are up the task of handling files of large size, the display that depicts your work with clarity and depth, the printer that conveys your work in a full range of colors and prints a deep black, and so on. His advice has served me well over now a long career of making pictures. 

Thanks Harry for that.

My friend Gail now has a second Rollei SL66. I was honored to part with it as the Rollei is the primary tool she uses to make her art. And her first Rollei is showing signs of being very tired. 

Funny, I have often sold cameras to buy new or different ones. In 1984 I sold a Hasselblad Superwide that was about as important to me as my right eye to buy the one and only 8 x 10 camera I ever used: the 8 x 10 Toyo Field. 

But I still have my Rollei.

Neal Rantoul, 1972, made with the Rollei and 80mm f2.8 Carl Zeiss Planar lens

Coming up: Part 2 of the Rollei SL66 experience. And some insight into who photographed with one.  Hint: think Aaron Siskind, Ansel Adams, etc.

Note: you can read about more of my early work here.

The photographer sits at his desk on the island in the house he owns with his two sisters. It is a mid sixties Eliot Noyes designed house with a broad view of the south coast of the island as it is sited high up on a hill overlooking a mile of land before the shore with a view all the way out to the horizon. He has spoken before how this location is partially responsible for an aesthetic long on horizontality over now a career of making landscape photographs. 

2012

Faced with hip surgery soon, he finds himself unable to do things he used to take for granted. He is still able to make pictures that connect and have force, though perhaps the car is parked nearby or the picture is made close to the road, for walking isn't easy. But his fluidity with his medium is due to decades of work looking and making pictures of what he sees.

He has made new pictures at the the other end of the island in a remote place where soil erosion is winning the battle against a stand of trees.The ocean is at its most powerful here and a cut in the point of sand has wreaked havoc where the waves meet the land. 

2014

In several flights to photograph the island over the past three years, he has been struck by how much this particular landscape has been transformed. As the bluff erodes the trees have no choice but to fall, one by one. This time he drove to the end of the dirt road, parked and walked along the strip of trees, looking out at the ocean as it ripped around the outermost bend in the island. 

As is typical for him, he found himself interested in wildly different content looking out and in, a 180 degree metaphor for the external and internal lives we all lead.

This work, some new and some now three years old, is forming in his head as a project that will look at a piece of island land both from the air and also on the ground. This will be his third such project, and seems surprising to him that this isn't done by others here. This sense one has of what the place really looks like from the air as in a kind of survey contrasted with what is perceived of the individual choices he makes as he works throughout the land on foot. One almost objectified and the other highly personal, almost intimate. The place versus his place. Like that.

These two from a series in 2014 that looked at Tom's Neck from the ground (well, actually, from the water as he made these while in a kayak) and from the air.

These are from the island of Chappaquidick near the Dyke Bridge.

The other project made here, the first, is: Spring and Fall

As he sits at his desk as the light fades from the day writing and thinking about these photographs and all his work made here on the island, he finds the challenge of making new work of this landscape to be difficult but also extremely rewarding. One of his teachers long ago, Aaron Siskind, who also photographed here, said to him that the place was only an island, meaning that you would inevitably run out of material here. The photographer has at times worked hard here and at other times not at all but he finds now there are still things to do on this island. 

He is very fortunate to live at least part of the year in a place of such beauty and diversity. 

He chooses to end with these, in black and white now, of the trees that fell and haven't yet been swept away by winter storms. And the last picture, forecasting a very different season approaching.

The photographer is represented by 555 Gallery in Boston. Please contact Susan Nalband, the gallery owner, with any questions about this work or any other by the photographer who happens to be named Neal Rantoul.

Of course you can always email me and I welcome your comments: Neal's email

In 1983 I made a group of pictures in the town of Solothurn in Switzerland. 

They were a breakthrough group for me. As big as Nantucket (my first series) or the Oakesdale Cemetery (made in 1997) pictures, these brought me into a new way of seeing, in making sequential  pictures and established and confirmed a methodology that serves me to this day.

This was the first time I linked pictures next to each other. Putting something hinted at in one frame then clearly stated in the next but with the whole scene around it changing. A concept totally reliant on the very wide lens I used being held level to deceive the viewer into thinking all was normal when, of course, it was not. Note the laundry drying rack coming right up into your face in the second frame. That's an indicator at the severity of the width of the lens.

I wrote recently about the  pictures from Arsenale in Venice made 20 years later. Clearly, the pictures from Solothurn are the precedent (on the site here). I don't know if you can learn something from them or if they read as relevant today, but they sure rocked my world then. Epiphany? Oh yes, for sure. The closest I can come to Solothurn in the present day is the The Wall, Chelsea, MA made in 2014. If I hadn't made the Solothurn pictures 31 years earlier who knows if I would have arrived at the same place.

Note the same crumbling wall in all three of the photographs above.

Part of the act or life of being a career artist has to be this: the ability to sense that you've arrived at something large enough to pay attention to, to remember, to use in your cache of abilities, to apply when you find yourself in front of it again. In my case, this way of working is clearly a subset of a larger structure, the series work itself. You must have that too, a way of seeing or a sensitivity to a certain form or shape or content that you've worked with before and are familiar with. Repetitious? No, I don't think so. Just working within a construct that has worked before and that is used again when relevant.

In looking at these again, now made 32 years ago (yikes!), I find huge differences in the way I was seeing back then compared to now. The pictures looked less "together", less formalized, less structured and tight. There is a looseness to the Solothurn pictures that I like very much. Blurry here? Whatever. The edge not perfect? So what.

Don't like that branch coming down and intruding into the frame? Deal with it. A little assertive and sure. I am not implying I am less now, just different.

Take that camera with its fixed 38 mm Zeiss Biogon lens out of level and all hell breaks loose. 

See why I was so excited? These three frames above sliding along that same wall with the shutters, the door, the propane tank, and the wonderful bonus of the hanging garment in plastic rendered in multiple frames was simply too much. 

And then we start a new chapter or section:

Completely irresistible.

Solothurn, CH 1983. 

Magic. 

Want to see real prints of these? Contact 555 Gallery and ask if they can be made available for viewing. But be careful: there is only one set of the original 1983 prints and I do not break up series work for individual sales. But know this: you can look all you want for free.

In 2003 I went to Venice, Italy to scout it out as a possible location for teaching photography in the summers for Northeastern, where I ran the Photo Program. My idea was to combine forces with Holly Smith Pedlosky to teach photography for a summer semester for the school. Holly had gone to Venice frequently ever since her honeymoon when she was younger so she knew Venice very well. She also had been teaching workshops for many summers in Venice and, on alternating years, in Varenna, a village on the edge of Lake Como. Sadly, Holly died in 2012 of cancer (obituary here). Holly and I spent a week or so that summer traipsing around Venice, speaking to locals about how it all might happen: working on where we would house students, where we would teach, what we would teach, where we would house the faculty, the various logistics involved and so on. Little did I know that upon my return to Boston there would be a nightmare of bureaucracy and obstacles thrown up by Northeastern in the process of trying to make it all happen. Suffice it to say it took two more years of sitting in meetings with amazingly inept people, filling out forms and explaining the concept to pull it off. Argh! It gets my blood boiling just to think about it now. I was successful, though, and ran the course in Venice for three years myself. In fact, it is still running every summer.

That summer in 2003 I wasn't only there to plan a future study abroad program, I wanted to photograph. One of the areas that caught my eye was at the arsenal, (arsenale in Italian). Arsenale is a vaporetto stop (water taxi) and is the walled fortification where the military was housed to defend Venice throughout much of its long history.

But my interest was along the back side outside the walls of the Arsenale where it was, frankly, a mess. To get there I had to get off the vaporetto at an obscure stop on the other side of the island that really led to nowhere. There were some overrun gardens nestled up against the arsenal's walls. I might have had to cross a fence to get access. One of the advantages of increased age is that I can't remember.

What I loved about this place was that it was what the locals created away from the crowds of tourists. Venice is finite, an island in a lagoon with way too many people all the time. It is a sort of bizarre Disneyworld in that it is a place that is in existence to present itself to hordes of tourists from all over the world. And to get their money. But on the outside of the back side of Arsenale locals had a few tables, grew a few vegetables and escaped from the relentlessness of thousands upon thousands of people tromping through their city like in a siege. This place was an escape.

As I began to photograph it seemed odd but I was on familiar ground for I had made a series of pictures in a manner much like this many years before. The project was called Solothurn and was from a small town in Switzerland where the series unfolded in a sort of jigsaw puzzle of sequenced pictures. My series Arsenale is like that.

You can see that here everything is the same but different from frame to frame. I wrote a little about this way of working, referring to the Solothurn portfolio, made in 1983:

Solothurn CH to be precise. Having gone to a European photo festival in the town I set out with the Hasselblad SWC and several rolls of film down the back side of these row houses on a mid afternoon mid week in mid summer. Bang! These things so interconnected and intertwined as I walked down the street, something frame left was showing up in the next one, frame right. Like a jigsaw puzzle, the challenge was to see that, search, find the connection, the thing in its new location, and move on. This was a new way of working, of course. I’d never connected pictures to pictures this way before and this one hit me hard. There are also several frames where I push the lens right into something, more than I’d done before. It was this series that showed me how good the SWC was close in.

Let’s not forget that this is very early series days and this is maybe the third one I’d done (I started making tightly sequenced series work in 1981). It was a big period of learning for me as I was now in the work, so to speak. Not trying to get to the work, not hoping to be in the work, not wishing for anything except another shoot as good as the last shoot. “In the work” means I am in the project and consumed with it. Story of my life, really.

So there I was on the backside of the wall of Arsenale in Venice, Italy, making these pictures, sliding along to place something that had been on the left now in the center and/or perhaps next on the right

with the wall the glue that held the pictures together and made them compre-hensible.

So here, twenty years after I'd made the Solothurn pictures I was  back in this process in front of this wonderful and complex place and knowing I had a way, a method, a strategy by which I could make pictures. You get that, I am sure. That there needs to be a framework around which you hang your pictures, some sort of logic or process by which you work.  At least in this manner, this way of tightly sequencing the work to strive for a whole. 

I can't really go through all of them here as the post will be too long but will place them all on the site on the gallery page soon so you can see the full set.

At any rate, the project moves on in its incremental way and arrives here

to one of those "aha" moments, this rule breaker, this foundation shaking picture which is, all modesty aside, simply gorgeous with its structure, softness, its breaking away from the back wall to establish itself as no longer dependent upon the wall for visual support. It is a core picture in the series, one that many of the other pictures pivot around and one that hits close to home for me emotionally.

And, of course, it goes very well with this:

where things have really gotten a little out of control, growth-wise. The series concludes with a little more logic, a little restoring of things to a sort or normalcy. I am not usually a cynic and this series, made in 2003, came back around to the wall again and also to some of the tools used in keeping a garden.

I will finish soon, I promise, but bear with me for one more point. While I have discussed this way of working, this sliding down something to form a whole through composite parts (not so dissimilar to what what I did with Dorothy, from the Wizard of Oz, in the current show at 555 Gallery up until Oct 17 of my Monsters work which I really hope you go see) there is another concept at play in Arsenale. Is the seminal picture of the concrete pyramid made as it was found as I moved along the back wall, in essence there as if come upon as a surprise? Or are the other pictures made to hover around the pyramid because it was known and made first? To bring you into this one core image? Is this one picture made by calculation for perceived effect or by intuition in an emotional response? There are two different motivations as possibilities at work here and there would be two different results, I believe. For the record my process in making the Arsenale photographs was the former, for I didn't know the pyramid existed until after I'd made the earlier images in the series. So, yes, I came upon the pyramid. I love that, that the artist has made discoveries just as you do as you look at the work, picture after picture. That's in there, I believe. The joy or amazement in discovering an exceptional something in front of me and all it takes is the quality of my practice and the smarts to know it is exceptional. Finally, it is a contextual thing. No way would the pyramid photograph have any interest or relevance if the other sequence hadn't preceded it. Igor Stravinsky's melody and harmony make little sense and have little impact unless there is dissonance and stridency before them.

I find it ironic that the series of photographs of Arsenale is about the outside and back of the structure and this blog has been about the inside of the series.

We are done with Arsenale and its meaning and implication. What this is, of course, is explication. The explanation of the meaning of something. In large part it is what this blog is for. In the case of my work, to bring you into it and to help you understand it better and clearer, at least from this one person's perspective. Good work? Bad work? Can't really say, I just can relate it to you as I worked it, saw it then and see it now through the perspective of many years distance.

Care to respond? Feel free. As always, easy. Email me here