I just added a series to the site called Mountain Work from 1977/78, (here). Hard to believe I was making pictures so long ago but it's true.

Mountain work was series work before I knew most of my career I would be a series photographer. I made them during a very active period when I was carrying several projects at the same time. In truth my single mindedness about making pictures back then looks, from this perspective, a little deranged but there is no doubt I was making good work in there, if perhaps making too much. Mountain Work was a portfolio of 20 black and white photographs made at the top of  "drive up"mountains. I thought then and still do that these are unique places, with wide vistas, huge skies and, in the summer, people from all walks separated from their more mundane lives, placed as though the sky above was a sort of backdrop for them and, yes, presumptuous I know, for me as well to photograph their interactions, joys  and gestures at being on top of the world. I was passionate about the project and went to places like Mt. Tom, Mt Battie, Mt Tamalpais, Mt Washington, Mt Cadillac. The only rule was that this be a destination you could get to by driving to the summit. Tourist mountains.

Wait a minute. Do you realize the exceptional-ness of the last few sentences in the paragraph above?  This from the guy that does not photograph people. Well, I did in this series, so there. From Mountain Work in 1978 to Monsters in 2015 (some 37 years!) being shown at 555 Gallery in Boston in September, I've gone from photographing the human beings in situ to photographing fake people as masks and mannequins. We will see soon if this is progress.

At any rate, before we get to the pictures let me place them in context. In those years I was single, had not yet started a family and was in my early 30's. I began teaching at Harvard in the fall of 78, was teaching summers at the Maine Photographic Workshops, and had been teaching at NESOP (New England School of Photography) for a couple of years. I would, the following winter, take a self imposed leave from both to drive through the Southwest to photograph. This was the trip that changed my life because I spent 3 days with Fred Sommer (posts on that begin here and continue for three more, searchable by typing Fred Sommer in the search field).

The Mountain Work also ushered in something else. The pictures were mostly made with Kodak's Plus-X. The year before I had devised a new and constant film agitating procedure for processing my negatives and was showing that off with these pictures. While these on screen won't show it well, the large expanses of middle tonality grays of skies in the series were smooth and clean. 

I would drive to the top of the mountain, park, get my camera out and stay for hours, watching as the cast of characters changed as they got out of their cars, headed over to the viewing area, pointed out at things way off, took pictures, hung out a little, got back in their cars and drove away. Only to be replaced with others in a steady stream of  humanity in all shapes, sizes and dispositions. 

This was a sequenced series, in that it moved from start to middle to end in a flow. 

I treated vehicles about the same, photographically, as I did the people.

What's the exhibition history of these pictures?  Practically nonexistent. I showed them once, in a show at my niece's non profit gallery in Newport RI in the 90's. Published? Nope. Anyone know about them before now? Pretty safe to say no. The prints are about 12 inches square, toned with selenium and cool in color. This is a little embarrassing to admit but there is only one copy of these prints. Back then, no one I knew printed editions or copies of prints. 

This one, with a Rollei SL 66 that could tilt, made hand held. Scheimpflug through space. Don't know what that is? Go here. Sharp from small bush in foreground, through woman's arm then off to the left through trees and to the horizon. All the rest not sharp. I used this camera quite often that way. I felt it differentiated my work and that I could direct the viewer's path through my pictures.

I always thought this one above predicted my moving into a stage of marriage and being a young parent with a baby in my arms. In fact, I would be a parent four years later.

This one is a favorite: independent activities on the stage of this parking lot at the same time, almost as though choreographed.

As the series moved on it began to reduce the people in scale to smaller and smaller.

Then, in the next to last picture, the shock of three people, the largest yet, and an acute foreground-to-background range through the fog of early morning at Mt Tamalpais north of San Francisco. I always loved that gesture,  someone pointing off to somewhere.

And finally,

with the lone figure standing on the rock way back there, the picture bisected at a 45 degree diagonal.

The full series is here. 

Let me know what you think, but please, take a look at the full set first.

Neal's Email

Note: this is an extremely poor facsimile of the originals.Want to see the actual prints? This can be easily arranged through 555 Gallery, as they represent my work.

By the way, I made another Mountain Work series of pictures in 2011. They are here.

This is the second part of two posts on the pictures I made in Lebanon, NH in the late  90's. Part one is here.

Lebanon is close to Hanover, NH and also White River Junction, VT. I found it to be mostly a working class town with quite a bit of traffic passing through. I liked it also for a couple of the neighborhoods I found: residential and older, established but also with some diversity and variety.

Once I'd made my point of pairing images together to compare and contrast the way the same things rendered differently I moved on, still alternating between times of the year but making single pictures:

being fully aware that I'd built the expectation that this would be the first of a pair.

Here's the next one:

The first one being highly spatial and with a clear foreground/background contrast as an objective to lead you to where the light was to the second which is flat, planal and light, or at least light gray. The side of the house also plays with depth as it has two walls, one larger than the other through the realization that the clapboards on the left are closer together because they are farther back. So, perhaps these are paired in some other ways? Exactly my point. Set up a theme or an idea and then run through some derivations on the same theme. Not break through but how often has photography done that? Maybe Nathan Lyons has. Maybe Robert Frank did.

Let's move on.

We're still playing here with pairs. This a comparison of two seasons: one really  disgusting, that time in New England where snow is on its way out in March or April but it is muddy and gray and high summer when growth and green and lushness prevails.

These two, another in this new language of pairing, allowed me to work with depth perception and to contrast the garage doors at the end of a path and as the start to one.

The last three photographs in the series begin to break down pairing and ask the   viewer to form connections based upon the rest of the group as precedent. How much are you predisposed to assume the connections between pictures based on what you've already seen? While I don't have the answer to this, I do pose the question:

This last one, the conclusion to the set, is intended to use some of the past practice to reinforce the singularity of the image. In effect, I was working to convey depth but also to indicate a clear object, like I'd done with the first picture, to take the viewer to an objective, in this case surrounded by a superstructure that was supportive and that framed the bush. But also, I regard this picture a little like the the period to a sentence. The End.

That's it for Lebanon. Did I leave some out? Yes, I did.  Want to see the full set in all its glory? Contact 555 Gallery in Boston and ask if you may come by and see the prints. We will make that happen. The prints are unmounted, about 12 inches  square and archivally printed on 14 x 17 Kodak Polymax paper and toned with selenium. They are irreplaceable as the paper is no longer made.

Oh, and Happy New Year! I don't know where you'll be New Year's Eve but I know where I will be. 555 Gallery is throwing one helluva party. Usually I am long gone by midnight but not this time. I hope to see you there.

In the early fall of 2008 I fell and ruptured my quad tendon two days before I was leaving to live in Italy for three months while on a sabbatical leave from my teaching position at Northeastern University. How I fell is far too bizarre a story to tell here and I won't subject you to details.

At any rate, I was promptly in surgery, then laid up at home, then in rehab and taking a cab to physical therapy, my leg in a brace, starting to get around on crutches, etc. etc. By January 2009 I had deferred the sabbatical and was back at teaching, initially on crutches.

Where was photo during that fall? Nonexistent, of course. To someone who is wedded to the medium this was like being starved or alone on a desert island without a camera. By late fall I was just being allowed to drive. I could loosen the hinge on the brace on my left leg, lift my leg up into the car and drive.

I chose Quincy, about 30 minutes from Cambridge where I live. I remember the first time I went. I got myself extricated from the car and hobbled on my crutches for about 20 feet, sliding along on about an inch of snow. Realizing this was insanity, I turned around, got back in the car and drove home. On the second trip I used a  camera on a tripod while stumbling along on crutches and managed to make some initial pictures. They weren't very good but it was a start. As my health improved I went back and back and the series developed into something as my leg allowed me to do more.

Quincy Quarry has a rich history. 

Arthur Griffin's picture of young men diving off the cliff into the water below ended up on the cover of Life Magazine:

The Quarry also had the reputation for a place to dump stolen cars and dead bodies. The films Gone Baby Gone and The Departed come to mind. It was filled in with dirt from the Big Dig in the early 2000's. 

Since I was interested in the graffiti spray painted on the cliff walls, I took the project from an initial few prints made in black and white and transtioned slowly to color.

This is really a project about color, with the idea that photography works well as a comparative tool. Colors are more striking when contrasted with black and white.

This then allowed me to move in closer and to really look at the elegance and aesthetic of what these night time taggers did.

And what they did with color.

Do I know how clichéd a subject this is? Do I know that graffiti is a constant theme used by students in photo programs in big cities across the USA? Yes. Doesn't make it irrelevant, does it? And it didn't feel to me like I couldn't make a contribution as well.

I've now put the full series up on the site here.

I would  be interested in hearing what you rethink of these. You may also subscribe to this blog. 

Reminder: The Focus Awards are at the Griffin Museum this Saturday, starting at 11 am for brunch. See you there.

Laurie Anderson sings "days go by" in a powerful refrain in the song "White Lilly". Nothing could be more true when spending time in the wonderful island called Martha's Vineyard.

This 25 mile long island off the coast of Massachusetts is its own world, of course. Anytime you spend time on an island the mainland fades away. Spend three straight weeks here and you have an isolation that not only has you forgetting about traffic jams, the hectic pace in the city and deadlines but also the world outside the island  all together. 

With a constant flow of house guests and driving them to and from the ferry, trips to town to shop for food, hikes on the beach and on inland trails, long discussions after a meal sitting at the dining room table or clearing space to look at a box of photographs, time seems suspended in a never ending cycle of days that "go by" one after the other in a sort of blissful haze of activity that is fast paced but where they all blend together too, different but the same really.

Somewhere in there, as I carve out space to work, I have ongoing photographic projects I need to attend to. There is the tree in Aquinnah that needs my attention on a daily and seasonal basis:

There is the building of the fish pier in Oak Bluffs:

now finished.

Finally, there is some work to try to figure out if there is merit in making pictures of some trees across a field that I first photographed in a photo class in 1968!

Ancient history I know, but true. In case you have trouble doing the math that is 46 freaking years ago! OMG!

I was taking a 4 x 5 intro class and thought that it would be good to come here to the island to make my first pictures. I hauled the school's Calumet view camera to the island in its fiberboard case, loaded the holders like we'd been told in class, set it up on the tripod in front of these same trees and made several exposures. Back at school in the gang darkrooms after a weekend on the island, I developed the film and made 4 x 5 inch contact sheets. In each frame along the center bottom of the image was the rail of the view camera, sticking into the image as a blurry reminder that it might be a good idea in the future to look over the whole image portrayed back on the ground class.

Oops.

I don't know about you but the photographs I make need some time to gestate, some looking at and thinking about them to understand what to do with them. Very seldom is the first impression the final outcome.

Where the "rubber meets the  road" is in making decisions as to how to print what I've shot. This will go through perhaps a few experiments. I might try a couple of  different sizes or pushing prints darker or lighter to see what that looks like. Or play with the color palette or tonality, amount of sharpening, type of paper (this is a big consideration for me) or even if I am adding any color to a black and white image. In darkroom days I used Kodak's Rapid Selenium Toner for every print. I did that to remove the slightly olive cast of many papers, particularly Ilford's Miulitgrade paper. In Silver Effex's Pro 2, a plugin I use often to make the conversion of my files to black and white, there is a toning setting for Selenium that I sometimes use.

At any rate, I wrote a couple of weeks ago about a day I had kayaking along the Connecticut River in New Hampshire (River Paddle). I liked very much some of the pictures I made as I walked up stream from the river to sit on a log and have my lunch. The stream was in late summer mode, lazy and with water trickling down it, much of its stream bed exposed. As I tried printing different approaches: conversion to black and white, a mat surface paper,  adding some color back in, I tried to resolve whether I had a full series or not. A series for me is a sequential body of work, usually from as few as 11 to as many as 30 or so. I didn't think that I did, although I could construct a rational around the actual "walk upstream" I took, wading through shallow water holding my camera at shoulder height so as not to get it wet. It wasn't   and presently isn't so much a full series but perhaps a few pictures with a single point: what mankind leaves behind, the detritus I  found on the stream bed. I had tried to contrast these pictures with the real purity of the untouched landscape in front of me but to be truthful this was a place that was not nature untouched at all. This was about as "pure" as it got:

Not so interesting perhaps and certainly a little passive or even generic, never what one wants of one's own pictures.

There is loss and gain, of course. The loss is that most of the pictures I made that day (some of which I like very much) will likely never be seen or printed. Losing 40 or so breaks my heart a little. But what I gain is three photographs that have impact and punch, not diluted or compromised by others that may serve as only support around them. And yes, impact? Ah, what present day digital capture can do. The prints are 37 by 25 inches. One is printing behind me as I write this. 

They will be framed 45 by 34 inches. Hung side by side, the three in a row with the granite wall in the center? Killer. Epic.

A final caveat from someone who frequently prints quite large. When you print big, the print becomes very difficult to look at unless it is pinned up on a wall or framed. Sitting next to your printer, rolled up, is not a good way to determine if you have a good print or not. 

I print at home but will frequently take big prints to my studio to lay them out on a big table to view them.

If you don't have a big printer and are going to have someone else print your files for you, try to work locally, meaning choose a printer that will allow you to print out a few test strips to see how your file will look when printed large. Does it hold? Are you  pushing it too large? Has your sharpening strategy and file management been effective? Or are you just making an image larger with little consideration of how much more you are asking of everything you use: your camera, its ISO, the lens, the aperture and shutter speed, use of a tripod or not, the DOF and so on.

Printing large is like this: 

it's the bottom of the ninth

your team is 2 runs behind

bases are loaded

there are 2 outs

the count is 3 and 2 

Like that.