Nantucket

This is big. This time we will look at the body of work that started me working in series, one of the ways I continue to make photographs today. Note the date: 1980. Nantucket is the first real series I ever made. I am going to devote some time to it here as I look forward to reliving it (and testing if I remember it well) and, although the work looks surprisingly modest today to me and most likely to you, it is a seminal body of work in my career's output and very important as such. 

Here we go.

Let me place the series in context. It is 1980, I am teaching at Harvard, have stopped teaching at the New England School of Photography in Boston and will begin teaching at Northeastern University by 1981. I am single but not for long as I will meet my wife to be in a few months. By this time I have been teaching for a summer or two at Martha's Vineyard in something called the Chilmark Photography Workshops, started by Carol Lazar. In the summer of 1980, I am running the workshop, handling logistics, working with a TA, lecturing, presenting others' work with slide shows and am teaching shooting, camera controls, darkroom and heading the class towards a final project in a three-week workshop. I think I had about 15 students. Field trips were frequent but, by the time we're starting our third week, we were all a little burnt out on shooting on Martha's Vineyard. Islands have their limitations. I found that there was an early morning ferry that would take us from the Vineyard to Nantucket, leave us there for the day and return us to the Vineyard by early evening. We decided to go.

We arrived in Oak Bluffs where we would catch the boat for Nantucket in the early morning in mid-July and it was hot, the air was stagnant and there was thick fog.  I made a few pictures in the fog while we waited to board.

Fog is so wonderfully dislocating and this one of the three boys fishing on the ferry pier has been shown frequently over the years. To me it seems from a different era, clearly coming from a sensibility different than todays. It looks optimistically at the mystery of our world with a sense of wonder and is quite naive, I believe. I am far too jaded to make a picture like this now. By the time we're on the boat, the fog is beginning to burn off. Over an hour later we get to Nantucket and disembark. We mill around for a little bit, then I pull the group together to tell them we are here to photograph, give them a couple of things to work on and set them free, asking them to be back at the boat for the return trip late in the afternoon. Off they go and so do I, with no real thought in my mind as to what I will do. It is hot, the kind of day where you don't really know the direction of the light as it is bright but flat, your shirt sticking to your back and where you'd prefer to be sipping something cool under a tree or maybe be in the ocean riding the waves. I had a pouch on my belt with several rolls of 120mm Kodak's Tri-x and Plus-x film in it, a Hasselblad Superwide in my hand, a Pentax Spotmeter hanging around my neck and a baseball cap on my increasingly bald head. I was 34 years old.

I started to wander around the town, avoiding the main street as it was far too touristy for me. Soon I found myself walking along back streets. It was quiet with an occasional car and few people. I began to see things that looked interesting to photograph. If I go back through the rolls I shot that day 33 years ago I can see a few frames at the start where I was beginning to form an idea about pictures existing next to pictures. I made this one:

Such a benign looking picture now, but this actually shook my world in a fundamental way back then. Why? What did I care about? The accelerated space of that fence pulling back in the frame, the bifurcated image, sliced in two with the railing receding fast, the triangles of the roofs stacked on top of each other in the mid background, the planal quality of the house with windows on the right compared to the straight-on house in the far background, which is parallel to the foreground fence, the tree on the left with its rough texture, knotted and looking like warts with branches heavy with leaves hanging down into the sky in the center of the frame. This soft flat light so perfect for this work with almost no shadows elevates this picture to the wonderful combination of the outright banal and the supremely sublime at the same time. As far as photographic aspirations go this one hit it out of the park for me.

What freaks me out now so long after is that I knew it. This picture and the next couple got my attention, made me wake up and stay focused and, as has happened so many times since, I found myself saying to myself, "Neal, do not blow this." I didn't. I got serious, stayed on track, held the camera steady and proceeded to go to work. In fact, I had a little help. I was in familiar territory. A couple of years before I had completed a two-year project called "Fences and Walls"  which was of fences and walls (no big surprise) but also dealt with depth, foreground to background relationships and layering. Of course, you never know whether something you've done will provide support for what you are doing now but you hope so. This was one of those times.

This one, the second in the series, establishes that I am looking in between the homes and also that the angle of view is extreme. Much of this work addresses the photographic seeing involved, the character, which is unique, of the optic and the special and spacial relationships that are formed by the way the lens sees these domestic scenes. By standing on a wall across the street I was able to diminish the street and put the back of the truck in the lower left of the frame while keeping the verticals essentially straight and parallel. I am referring, of course, to convergence, what a lens does when pointed up. Odd that this is so easily corrected now with software. Software? I had no idea any of that was coming when I made these pictures. Finally, there is a strong connection from this picture to the previous one. The centering prevails in both but this one centers in negative space as opposed to positive space. We will see this same thing repeating throughout the series.

The third in the Nantucket series moves in far tighter but maintains the sense that we are looking down an alley created by two buildings.

It is a study in grays and is an acutely flattened tonal scale. I made very flat and gray negatives by overexposing the film and then underdeveloping it. This limits the contrast and builds density in the shadows. Normally, with flat light like this, working in black and white, you would do just the opposite. It is the primary reason there is some density to the gray sky in these photographs.

Jeffrey Hoone, in his introduction to my book "American Series" writes that I  consciously tilt the camera to skew the perspective and put things a little off center. This picture is a good example of that.

Harry Callahan, who was one of my teachers, said a truly elegant thing and that was that he believed we pretty much always make the same picture. Looking back at these now I see it is true for, despite looking like they are very much made in the past, I find them somehow essential for me.  Of course, they also are developmental in that they were made when I was still learning and growing photographically. 

BTW: This work's exhibition lineage is extensive as the series has been shown numerous times. Peter MacGill (now of Pace MacGill) chose to show the full series at Light Gallery in NY the following summer and the work was in a one-man show at the RI School of Design Museum in 1981. Later on, I would show either a few of the series or the whole series in shows to reference the start of the concept of working this way. In the RISD Museum show, I printed the whole series on 16 x 20-inch paper to fit with the other island-based work of mine from Bermuda in the show. The original Nantucket series is printed on Kodak 14 x 17-inch Polymax paper and is toned with selenium. The prints are about 12 inches square. Finally, although I had a few offers over the years to sell individual prints, I never did. The original series is intact and in excellent condition. 

I am going to stop here, three into a series that is 16 prints in all.  But stay tuned as we continue with Nantucket Part 2.

When I started to show in the late 70's in the Boston region a review in the Boston Globe was the benchmark by which all other press coverage was measured. As my teaching career progressed in the 80's and I was under consideration for tenure, no review in the Globe was tantamount to no show at all. Was a bad review better than no review? Probably. All I can say is that I got tenure and there were a couple of reviews in there that were less than glowing.

Now I believe that has changed big time. Do you read the Boston Globe? Do you read it online as the free Boston.com, subscribe to the paper version or read is as   BostonGlobe.com?  I subscribe to the last one but I still don't read it all the way through. I would say I read maybe 1/3 of the photo show reviews written yearly in the Globe, if that. I've even missed a few that reviewed shows I was in. There are now so many places for work to be reviewed, mentioned, blogged about, Facebooked, Tweeted, etc.

In another aspect to showing, the announcement card was THE way people would know about an upcoming show. Perhaps a poster counted too, but think about it: how did anyone know a show was coming? The card. For a one man show I had in about 1980 at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover I found myself on press at Thomas Todd printers, perhaps the premier press in the area and certainly one of the top presses nationally, to oversee the print run on announcement cards they were printing. After several hours of tweaking an image that was being printed about 2 inches across I signed off and they ran the cards. Now you pay about $100 and send your file off to Modern Postcard to make a card for an announcement. If there is a card printed at all. Jason Landry of Panopticon Gallery doesn't make cards much anymore. He says there are so many ways to reach people now, the card is superfluous.

But back to reviews. Ever notice how a review is mostly a skim through a show and that it is very seldom either scathing or glowing? Newspaper reviews for the most part serve these days as notification of a show's existence rather than a real in depth criticism of an exhibition. 

In the end, yes, it is a very good thing to get a review from the city's primary paper. And yes, it can be helpful for those needing outside validation of their show. This is one of the ways promotion committees determine an artist's impact. Finally, more words written about your show the better, but nowadays it is probably most important to get the word out about your show from many many places, some of which you can do yourself.

What about national reviews? A piece in the New Yorker, the NY Times, an art magazine? Great, go for it. But these are not in my realm of experience.

One final thought, and this from someone who has had so many shows it is a little ridiculous: exhibiting your work, getting it up and on some place's walls, be it a big prestigious museum or in some coffee shop down a back alley in a small town is good. It is, after all, presumably why you do what you do. It fulfills the need to get the work seen. But shows are ephemeral, they are only on someone's mind, for the most part, when they are up. Whereas a review of a show, or a write-up on a popular  blog can go on and on and have a far longer life. This is the same rational used for making a book of your work. Ah books, I will save a discussion of books for another post. So much to write about and so little time.

I hesitate about going too far down the nostalgia path but this phrase would come up often among us as we were younger: "let's go shooting!" As students, when we had a day with no classes and a deadline looming of having to show new work in class, we'd often join up to drive someplace or sometimes just drive, looking for things to photograph. I don't know that it ever occurred to us that this was so random as to practically insure failure but it was always definitely a good time. Our approach wasn't very systematic in those days. For me there weren't "series" or "projects" or specific places I would go to make pictures yet, there were just adventures. I would get going early, pick up a friend and off we'd go. 

Of course there were discoveries, we'd come across things and places that were magical. My friend Rob Gooblar found a whole parking lot full of Airstream trailers, their stainless steel curves irresistible in brilliant sunlight, I found an abandoned drive-in theatre, still there today,

on Rt 146 in Millbury, a junkyard in Cranston, gravel pits, abandoned buildings, Cape Cod off season, ski areas in May, developments under construction, over passes on highways, gas stations and small town main streets, fields of corn, Crane's Beach in a snow storm, the Berkshires and farther out, the Adirondacks, the reservoirs out Rt 6 from Providence headed towards Hartford, and on and on and on.

After we finished school this tradition of hooking up to go photograph continued. I also moved it into my teaching and throughout my whole career hauled students all over on field trips to make pictures. At Northeastern these were known as PFAYVA trips (Photographic Foundation for the Advancement of Young Visual Artists ), a members group co-created by Andrea Greitzer and Scott Merritt, both photo students. I did field trips at Harvard and New England School of Photography too. The PFAYVA trips at Northeastern were legendary. Membership wasn't hard: if you were in a photo class or you'd had a photo course you were a member. It grew in the 90's into real trips with weekends spent in Vinylhaven, an island in Maine, another in Savannah, Georgia and practically yearly trips to Martha's Vineyard and Block Island. One trip to the Vineyard was so large we took out the whole Youth Hostel early in the spring before they opened for the season.

My whole career I've photographed alone, sometimes for weeks or months on end, and sometimes with friends, students, former students, groups and just one or two. Then there is photographing with someone who's not a photographer. This can be harder and is usually not my favorite thing. I have also photographed with a guide and this can be wonderful as the guide knows the best places to go to. I advise this if you're in a new area and don't have unlimited time; best is a photo guide.

What would we talk about as two or three of us would take off for a day when we were grad students? Our teachers, the other students, and what photography we'd seen or wanted to see by this artist or that artist, of course. We'd always be pissed at what a teacher said or didn't say, whether they'd liked our work or were indifferent to it (this was the worst) or didn't like it, which actually conferred a brief notoriety followed by a "What the fuck do you suppose he meant when he said…..?"question amongst us as we drove by countless possibilities for pictures, things definitely not pictures and poor attention span meaning we could be going past photo Nirvana out there but we'd never know it as we were too busy talking talking talking. Great times and missed. Far better to have had the experiences than not to have had them. 

Van Morrison sings the lyric "take me back, way way back" over and over again in a hypnotic refrain that resonates like a chant.

A couple of posts ago I wrote one called Going Back about returning to California to make some pictures. Well, this new one uses "going back" to mean something a little different.

In this one we are going way way back, to when I was still a student and after finishing graduate school, roughly from about 1970-1975. What's that like, to go that far back into my past to look at the art I was making when in my early 20's? Amazing. This is the age some of you readers are now or even more amazing,  it means you weren't born yet! It's as though, on the one hand, these were made by someone else and on the other I can still smell the fixer on my hands, the sound of the solid thunk of the 2 1/4  SLR Rollei's shutter I shot with as I took a picture, see me cutting the mat board, trimming the prints and mounting this new work made over forty years ago in preparation for a class. 

 Looking at it now, it is characterized by being highly graphic, simplified and reduced. I don't think I was revolutionizing  photography very much. I also seemed to move in pretty close. It now has me wondering if I had figured out by then that I could arrange things in space with more air between them, to juxtapose content to make connections less physical and perhaps more figurative. Perhaps that came later.

I also learned that my pictures didn't change much after finishing school, at least not right away. It took me awhile to shake off the influences and experiences that had prevailed while studying and to find my own voice. 

In these early days I tried my hand at sequential photographs, as in these two:

although I didn't stumble into actual series work until 1981 with Nantucket. 

Finally, and there will be more of these early work posts taking us way way back, I have one from something very different, although the tools were the same:

I spent a couple of years with a 24 inch square frameless mirror with hooks stuck to the back of it in the trunk of my car. I would often hang it between a couple of trees with fishing line so that it faced behind me, or, as here, prop it up with a rock.

Whacked, I know. I got it in my head that I wanted to see, yes, forward as the camera always did,  but that I wanted some way to see in a different direction at the same time. I was frustrated by the tunnel vision that the camera produced. The pictures seldom worked out, but that didn't stop me from trying. 

By 2006 I was definitely shooting digitally, but still had one foot squarely in shooting film as well. Westwood Village is a "hybrid" series in that it started out being made with a film camera, but then the processed negatives were scanned and made into archival inkjet prints. The prints are made as duotones, a process by which we can add a second color ink to the already neutral black ink we use to make black and white prints with an inkjet printer.

Westwood Village is a series that is the same but different in that it stays within the format I'd established over 25 years earlier of shooting series work in 2 1/4 inches square and making black and white prints (about 12 x12 inches) that were arranged sequentially to form a body of work. But it also diverges in that it starts out with the promotional brochure used to sell the units in the development.

I'd never done that before. But the contrast from the Utopian view of this midde income complex of townhouses to the reality of what it looked like at the end of the winter in March on a gray day in mid week with snow still on the ground was just too rich to ignore.

I remember printing these and how I'd refer back to the sales brochure. It influenced my printing as these are some of the ugliest prints I have ever made into a series.

Pretty bleak, huh? Things weren't that great for me that spring in 2006. At work we were suffering under departmental leadership that wasn't. Moral was low and the faculty were barely hanging on. Personally, my family life was nonexistent as I had little contact with my daughter, Maru, who was living in Florida. March in New England is never good. Cold and relentlessly gray, it is always a month that teases at spring's coming but never fails to deliver lousy weather.

But the earlier ones in the series are also a set up in that I did find beauty here on the side of this hill outside Danbury, CT.

In looking back at this picture now, almost eight years later, can I say I was consciously aware of the opposing triangles, the bush in the foreground and the roof in the background? Yes. I assume that's what got me standing there clicking the shutter. Do I like this picture? Yes, very much. Simple, bold, definitive, rich texturally, spacially interesting as there is a real journey from the front to the back, closed-in but opening out to that gray sky on the top; it looks to me like vintage Neal Rantoul at the top of his form (can't be accused of modesty there, can I?).

Anyway, this led me to a study of these evergreens, which seemed to soak up whatever light there was like a sponge and cover the hillside like a carpet.

Which I put up against the bland and rigid architecture of the development itself.

Despite the humor and irony of the opening images of the sales brochure, this is a serious set of photographs. I am shooting with both barrels loaded here, if you can forgive the gun-based analogy.

I also took a couple of  "creative license" turns here. And why not? At this point I had little or no following, no gallery representing my work, no big and prestigious shows coming up and no one beating down my door to see and purchase my work.

Besides, this was just too good to pass up; the stand of dark tees, this barren desert of lawn and the chink in the armor, this crack of a crevasse opening up and leading to the grid of the manhole cover. Tilt the camera? Absolutely.

So, how did I end this one? By using a time honored process of letting the pictures breath a little, letting the viewer see an opening or perhaps letting the viewer leave this place behind, or at least promise at the possibility. 

Escape? I couldn't wait to leave Westwood Village that day! I've driven past it many times since and have never exited the highway and driven up there to see it  again. Doubt I ever will.

The full series is: here

Contrast this one to the most recent post, from Italy: Fort Dei Marmi. Like from two different planets.

Blog's are very much a one way thing, for the most part. As the readership grows I am very pleased at this silent but positive response to my work. But it would be very helpful to hear from you. Are you getting anything from my writing about my work? Do you think I am on or off point in my comments and analysis? Once again, I will respect your privacy if you do email me.

Neal Rantoul may be reached here

Oh, and Happy New Year!