If you read the first installment (Finding Your Bliss) to this series of posts you'll know our story is about to arrive at its apex. 

Poucha Pond, Chappaquick, 2017

At the core of my aesthetic as a landscape artist are these two pictures. Some sky, some foreground and some land, often a strip off in the distance. It is what I painted as a spray painter in the late 60's and it sits at the foundation of decades of landscape work as a photographer.

Near Pullman, Washington 1997

the depth of her feelings for her chosen medium and its expressive character, for its ability to convey raw emotion, perhaps love? I believe so and with my really quite simple and perhaps naive picture made in 1976 the same sensibility pervades as I stretched my arms out and reached out to those swans, waiting for the click of the shutter. I was certainly struck with the contrast of the innate simplicity and beauty of this timeless event of two swans passing by and me standing there, a creature from a different world, tricky and high tech tool hung around my neck, this esoteric film recording the content in the infrared spectrum and producing a glow to my white skin.

It is tempting now so many years later to build more into this picture than it warrants and I am resisting being a sensationalist here, but there is no ignoring that this was clearly a crucial moment I was having that afternoon on the Vineyard. The realization that I had crossed a threshold holds true today.

So, what happened? What did I do after finding my bliss in this moment in 1976?  Well, stay tuned for #3 to find out.

As always, I invite your comments: Neal's email

An autobiography with an art slant, part 3.

I retired from my teaching position at Northeastern University in December 2012, after thirty years.

But before we bring things up to the present we have to go back a little to about  2005. This was when things went in a slightly different track.

Now a full professor, my position and place at the University was secure. As a senior faculty member, I applied for and was awarded more and better grants, several residencies and more times away than before. My first book came out that year

to critical acclaim, my work was being collected more, shown more and I had it in many major museums. This allowed a degree of creative freedom that was exhilarating. With the realization that I could do anything I wanted with my work, I did.

I  made pictures at 17 Cabela's stores across the Midwest:

I photographed at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia.

This led to work from Reggio Emilia in Italy:

And finally to the National Museum of Medicine and Health in Washington.

You get my point. I hadn't abandoned other ways of expressing, I had just expanded into other interests, including a preoccupation of just what "death" meant to me. 

This has happened to others, of course, but I was also beginning a disengagement from my position as a professor in those years, taking more risk as an artist and being more assertive. And some of the logistics for making some of this new work were complicated and difficult. Strike one for increased self-confidence. 

Let's stop here for this post. Next, we will go to what happened after I retired from Northeastern. I promise.

Italy, 1990 near Duino along the Adriatic

These photographs seem like they are from another time, another life.

You get so old you can't believe that was you 30 or 40 years ago. The reason for this retrospection? 

I've been scanning old negatives. 

It's brought me back to the 80's and 90's when I was a full-time professor and an 8 x 10 photographer.

1986 near Prescott, AZ with the Toyo Filed 8 x 10

8 x 10 photographer? Yes, this was an "identifier", a title to a certain way of photographing. To be an 8 x 10 photographer tended to mean you were someone who was very serious about your pictures, someone disciplined and something of a control freak. You needed to work clean (because of dust), most needed to have things like an 8 x 10 enlarger (often mounted on its own concrete pad to minimize vibration) and huge lenses that were very slow and very expensive, a heavy tripod and a dark cloth that you'd drape over your head when composing your picture.

I've been looking at work from Italy where I would teach most summers near Trieste or north of Rome in Viterbo. Summer after summer, a frantic pace of classes and shooting trips, weekends on my own in a rented car driving all over with the 8 x 10. Hundreds of sheets of black and white film shot each summer, spending months back in my darkroom just processing the film, often finding it would be February or March before I started to print.

Marble Quarry at Cava Romana, 1992

Years of this, not even thinking that this was a massive amount of work, not caring, for I loved it so. I am not sure this way of working would be possible today, with airport security being so tight and x-raying being so pervasive.

Tuba, near Trieste 1991

Tarquinia, 1992

By the early 90's, 8 x 10 was a greased system for me, practically the only thing I shot. Fluid and frequent with it as if it were something handheld or for any kind of photography. I'd just as soon haul it out to shoot a class picture at my daughter's school as I would to make a grand landscape on the edge of a cliff at Les Baux in Southern France. It was just the tool I used to make my pictures.  Ed Ranney from Santa Fe is a friend who was like this with a 5 x 7 or a 4 x 5 and I admired his work, so emulated his approach. He was fast and easy, no fuss, make the picure and move on. Likewise with Emmet Gowin. I liked his Italian garden pictures from the 70's and, yes, pointed down at gardens in Italy when I could, just like he did.

Near Viterbo, 1994

A new road under construction near Muggia, 1993

What was it about this format? The negatives contained so much sheer information that one never had to think about whether it would get that or if it could render that with subtlety and refinement. I never thought twice about making big prints from those negatives, and did. For a while 20 x 24 inches was a common size for me and I made many prints that were 5 feet across. In fact, I was proud of my craft for it was very difficult to be good with this large camera. I worked at my own development as well, researching and trying different films and developers, staining my negatives in Pyro for years, toning my prints in Selenium or more exotic metals, including gold. 

The craft was intertwined with the final print, the imagery integral to the process. 

What I photographed was in full knowledge of what that image could become as a beautiful print.

But, and it is a big but....

This is the truth and the real point of this post: No one but me knows this work, no one but me cares to see them, as prints or here in the blog. Nothing will happen to this work unless I make it happen and no one will choose to scan them when I am gone. They will have existed as physical negatives made in the late 20th century and then they will not. No one will know how to edit them and no one will care to do anything with them.

Near the coast at Tarquinia 1992

In present times, photographs can't exist unless they are digitized. I can't show these pictures to you in this form without scanning the negatives or prints first. I can't submit this work for exhibition or a grant, I can't share them without first making them into O's and 1's using a sensor. 

8 x 10. A few still use one. Bruce Myren locally to the Boston area does good work with one. Mercedes Jelinek and Liz Ellenwood, young photographers that use my old camera. Sally Mann I presume. Don't know if Emmet still uses his. 

If you are a photographer from a certain age you probably know just what this means. Otherwise, not so much.

Shooting square refers to the film size used, 120mm and 220mm film. Think Hasselblad, Rollei, Yashica and even Plaubel (although this one used the same film, it framed a rectangle). It was also larger format in that it inherently rendered in higher quality due to its negative size: 2 1/4 inches wide. This allowed bigger prints but also a broader tonal range and better sharpness when enlarged. Less grain too. The cameras tended to be bigger and bulkier, so not as fast as 35mm. But people did use them out and about, as well as in the studio. I was one of those that used them almost exclusively outdoors. 

Made zillions of pictures this way. Go to Nantucket, Yountville, Solothurn,  Portland, Westwood Village, Oakesdale, Bluff, Boston, Fences and Walls, Mountain Work, Bermuda Portfolio, Southshore, Nelson and on and on. Scroll to the bottom of the Gallery page on the site and you'll see them there, all in squares.

Slip up to present day, last week, actually, to our now highly evolved way of making pictures digitally, to the Nikon D850 where, for the first time in my knowledge, Nikon has provided a camera with an image area called "1:1". So, when gearing up to shoot in downtown San Jose, CA I set the camera for an image area of 1:1 and then converted the shot files to black and white in Lightroom and made a series that looks like I did in 1982. In fact, I just printed them.The first series of pictures from a month-long shoot in California.

Next, I will put them on the Gallery page of the site.

Quite simply they are of such astoundingly high image quality that they certainly blow away anything I ever did in 120mm with an analog camera and they most likely are a distinct improvement over anything I ever did in 4 x 5, let alone 8 x 10. I made the prints 14 inches square.

I can hear you asking, if you are a photographer, "What lens, Neal?" The Nikkor 14-24mm f2.8, a lens of now legendary quality and certainly the peer of the famous Carl Zeiss 38mm Biogon mounted to the Superwide Hasselblad that first surfacing in 1956.

Here I am, making pictures now that look very much like ones I made in my darkroom in 1979. But in a whole different world: digital and inkjet. With   quality unimagined, holding the camera in my hands, no tripod, no lightmeter hanging around my neck, no changing film every twelve exposures. No film agitating, drying, snipping and cutting, dusting off, placing in the enlarger, focusing, making an exposure, slipping the paper into the developer, the stop bath, the fixer, toning, then washing and squeegeeing, placing on a drying rack to dry overnight.

Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore.

After 911 things changed for many photographers. Working in a large format in Europe became much more difficult for Americans. There were some tense times att eh airport. Security would invariably want to get inside my 25 sheet 8 x 10 film boxes. They would say "open that". This seldom went well. 

Worse, even if I did get to Italy with my film intact, I ran the risk of having exposed film inspected and ruined on the way back!

Digital changed all that. By 2005 I was beginning to photograph digitally and was teaching in Venice in a new program I designed of a study abroad for Northeastern University students. 

Many students, total chaos and a great time. And heavy stress. What if I lost a student? What if a student got pregnant?  I photographed digitally in color those summers in Venice. 

This was a frustrating time, as putting in major effort wasn't resulting in pictures that I felt I could do much with. File sizes were small and so large prints weren't possible, at least in any real quality. This became a self-fulfilling prophecy: my work wasn't that strong because I didn't fully commit because I knew the quality wasn't going to be very high.

This one, above, is from 2005 and was the last year I worked in film, from a series called Vignole, a small island in Venice's lagoon that is mostly agricultural and not tourism-based. The prints were made by scanning the negatives and making inkjet prints. This image shows a marked difference in terms of investment, I think.

By 2009  I was fully committed to working digitally and had switched to using a full frame sensor. That year I was on a sabbatical leave and spent the fall living in Italy, retracing steps made earlier while teaching in the 90's.

1992 in 8 x 10

2009

I made comparative photographs that spanned 15 years or so.

2009

1993

Now I was using photography differently but also using Italy differently. No longer satisfied with just a single frame to speak about a place but working to compare two different times and visual sensibilities. This way of working meant that I was searching in 2009 for the same places I'd photographed in the 90's.

1991

2009

For this one in Trieste, I drove through this large city for hours to find the same place I'd photographed in 1991.

Next up? Italy 3