Throughout my career as an artist, primarily as a landscape photographer, but also working in other genres, I have returned countless times to Martha's Vineyard, where the Rantoul family home is. My parents built a house in the town of Chilmark in the mid sixties and after they died I share the home with my two sisters. We rent the house most of the summers and use the house in the spring and fall. As a matter of fact I am there now, writing this post rather than out photographing as it is raining and cold, with a steady fine rain that feels like a long time commitment to me.

While there have been real blocks of time where I couldn't of cared less about photographing here the past few years have resulted in a large amount of work, made both aerially and as ground based series too. 

I find it wonderful to have such a richness of beauty and form right near by. It does inspire me to work here these days, challenges me to come up with new projects and ways of interpreting what is here. Perhaps you have this too where you live. Things close by that you see daily that when seen through the eyes of an artist can be used to make art. I'd encourage this, this looking closer, considering what you pass by everyday as ammunition for your pictures. Your increased knowledge of an area seen daily on your way to work, the macro examination of your backyard, the looking  with a camera at the place where you get your coffee every morning, the different perspective and vantage point to something so taken for granted, so very mundane that it is almost invisible or as you think about that meeting coming up or that deadline approaching or next weekend when there's a camping trip or a reunion with old friends or a first date or.... you know what I mean. As visual artists we are trained observers, nothing gets past us, we are like sharks on a hunt, predators on the prowl, looking for pictures to make. 

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Now I am off island, but I was on the Vineyard last weekend and went up to the famous Gay Head Cliffs on Memorial Day Weekend in the afternoon on a nice day to see what was going on, this the unofficial start of the summer, only to find many many tourists taking selfies and posed snapshots with the cliffs or the lighthouse in the background. Not a camera in sight, all smart phones. I sat there and watched it all unfold, like a changing set of actors on a stage. What a killer this must be to the camera manufacturers who relied on the huge amateur market for most of their revenue for a very long time. Instamatics, Polaroid SX-70's, the Brownie, the Swinger, etc.

Talk about sea change, the smartphone picture is now practically universal with the point and shoot cameras for all intents and purposes gone. Yes, there are specialized cameras like waterproofs, action cams and drone cameras, but the phenomenon of bringing the camera on the vacation is really over. The smartphone rules. The best camera is the camera you've got with you and everyone has a phone with them, all the time.

You can see why the smartphone companies are making improvements to the cameras in their phones. This is a way to create a competitive edge. 

So, did I take these with a smartphone? I did not.

I don't know about you but I always am most passionate about what I am working on right now. Call it an obsession. It's what I think about, what I dream about, what I am driven to shoot more, edit more and print. Projects for me can take months or years of work, reshoots, trying out different presentations, different size prints and  different paper choices and so on. 

On the other hand, some projects come from only an hour or two of shooting, an afternoon of walking around photographing and then working for weeks later to coalesce the work into a whole; editing, sequencing and so on.

Because I am usually very into what I'm working on  right now I find it hard to go back through earlier material, to search for things I shot last month or even years ago that have never seen the light of day. 

As it turns out this isn't so unusual. Many photographers are more into the new and believe what's hot off the press is the best work ever. Typical for me is when I've been off somewhere on a trip to photograph. On coming back I start work on one or two bodies of photographs I know I have to see, to edit, and to print. The winter I lived in Santa Rosa, CA, it was two: the Salt Point Park 

series and the Skate Park series. 

Those two remain as the two primary bodies of work I made while there and hold a place in my heart as well as I learned new ways of seeing through those projects.  But as I shoot every day on a trip like that there is other work that deserves attention too. I did that with two series: Central Valley Aerials, a bizarre landscape of fields of lilacs and crops in a sort of stasis in February during a state wide drought and

Before and After Aerials, photographs I made early the day we went up and in the afternoon after we landed, also in the Central Valley.

I am glad I did as the work has stood up well over time. Of course, doing this can get complicated as, by the time I was working on those two series back at home, I was into something new and consumed by it. This can be a juggling game of balancing the present work with work being brought to the front done from the past. On the other hand, one of the benefits of letting things sit for a while is that often we have a far better perspective on work that's shot but not looked at yet or edited. When I was teaching full time I had a colleague who always was three years behind the work he'd shot, intentionally. 

One final point, and it is a big one but more germane to those that shoot digitally rather than with film. In earlier digital days the past work could be inferior in  technical quality. I was replacing cameras more frequently then as every year or so there were large steps forward. Small chip to full size chip, higher ISO's with less noise, better color engines, faster file handling, and yes, better lenses too. This meant that often I would go back into past things shot only to find they weren't up to my current standards of file quality or size, meaning there were big limitations on how big I could make a print or the quality of an image. Sharpening in particular was problematic when trying to make bigger images. Now, not so much. I would say that particularly things in terms of file size have stabilized enough that I can go back into 2012 or so and assume the files are practically as good as the files I am making now. This is a very good thing.

So, go back. Take the time to plunge into an earlier library or catalogue to see what you passed over then but should pay attention to now. I don't buy the rational that says older work isn't as good, or that the newest work is always the best. Your work is your work. You should think about giving it it's due. We often feel we aren't respected as artists that use photography. But this is about giving yourself the level of legitimacy you deserve for your work and  committing to it. You made the pictures and presumably put some effort and thought into them. Follow through. Make the edits, process the files, make the prints. Simple enough.

Over twenty-five years of shooting 8 x 10 I couldn't help but think of the warmer months as times for photographing and the winter as a time to process film and make prints. How many times have you been free to photograph when the weather is really bad and you can't go out? Or you'd like to be back on the Isle of Man or in South America again but you can't? Winter when stuck at home is a good time to go back to the pictures you made earlier and comb through them to see if there's anything else in there you missed. I bet there is.

As always I am reachable can reach me via email: here.

In November 2014 I flew to Paris, picked up a rental car and drove south to Alba, Italy to visit with my friends John and Donna, who lived there then. Donna was working during the days so John and I went off so he could show me around. We stopped a few times to photograph. One morning we stopped at some wine vineyards, as there was a break in the rain. This is the famous Barbaresco area of vineyards, maintained now for generations and known to produce some of the best wines of Italy.

Over a couple of hours, with my camera on a tripod and with a long lens, I pointed at the rows of vines. The lens compresses space, bringing the farther away in closer and putting the closer subjects on a similar plane. It was gray and flat, with occasional breaks in the clouds letting sunlight in. It was dead calm and looked like it could start to rain again any moment.

I have just finished a very urban set of pictures of a new apartment building in Cambridge called Zinc. In deciding to go through back files I think I was looking for a counter to the dystopian view of a contemporary world gone askew that was Zinc. The vineyard pictures I had made in 2014 in Italy proved to be just the thing: beauty and this ancient landscape of manicured vineyards in these rolling hills.

The head versus the heart. Pictures made with much thought, thinking through the angles, framing, photographing for impact and to drive the point home versus letting the process of photographing unfold, variety within a common theme, and letting the sheer beauty wash over me. No schedule, no time limits. Just working, looking and feeling the place, the smells, the air and being at someplace simply sublime. About as good as it gets.

Almost two years between these two sets of pictures. Without one would there be the other? Probably not.The Zinc pictures just shot and printed this spring (2016) are all about the work made in this crystalline clarity, jarring and cutting like a knife. In comparison there is a flow here, a pattern, one affecting the other that is important to see, to react to. Just as we need to be at our creative best when in front of something we are photographing, just as we need to be tuned and in top form when we are making the prints, we also need to be 100% aware of one body of work affecting another.

Can I say that I was thinking about the Vineyard pictures from Italy while I was making Zinc? No. Can I say that after finishing the work on Zinc, feeling depleted and a little low, I was searching for something uplifting, far away and imbued with color? Yes, I can.

This is probably a first for me. One body of work just finished precipitating the printing of an earlier body of work. Maybe I should pair them. Will think about that.

The full series is now on the gallery page of the site here.

Just finished in a still somewhat raw space is a high rise apartment building on Water Street in Cambridge. Billed as luxury living, the apartments look out on a wasteland, presumably cleared for future construction, then on to the huge blue MBTA Commuter Rail Maintenance Facility (its former name was Boston Engine Terminal) just north of North Station and Boston Sand and Gravel in Charlestown, a business made famous as scenes from the The Departed and others were filmed there.

I didn't spend much time trying to photograph the building itself but was fascinated by a fence put up to separate the new from the old, to establish the perimeter of the property and to restrict the view out to what was a sort of desert.

I have no idea what the logic of calling these apartments Zinc (Zn) is but at any rate the powers that be decided that the vinyl covering  for the fence would be a great place to have some graphics too.

What was behind the "curtain"?

This MBTA facility, which I was able to photograph by sticking my camera through a gap in a gate.

This new series goes on to look at the fence itself, what's obscured behind it and the printed graphics which depict something quite bizarre.

Boston is in the midst of a building boom, much of it centered on housing. Zinc is typical with a media room, work out facilities, expensive apartments, underground parking and a close-by T station.

The full series is now on the site here.

Technical footnote: many of you know I purchased the Sony A7R Mk II last fall and have been using it along with my Nikon for several months now. This project is the first I've made with some of the photographs coming from the Sony. Although the shooting experience is very different I found the final TIFF files to be practically interchangeable. 

In this post I am referring to Portland, Maine, just about two hours up the coast from where I live in Massachusetts. Last month I wrote about returning to Portland to make pictures on a twenty year anniversary of pictures I made there in 1996. Appropriately, that essay is called: Twenty Years Ago. The original Portland series is on the site here.

I went back again this week to try to add to the pictures I made last month. Once again, humbled by the difficulty of making good pictures while walking neighborhoods and pointing a camera at houses, streets, cars, alleys, sidewalks and fences, I worked to transcend the ordinariness to speak to larger issues. I walked and photographed. This has been my form of street photography for a long time and it is both all too easy and very very hard to do. I had great light, both on a late afternoon shoot and an early morning one the next morning.

I started here:

just as I did last month:

As I walked along, looking and photographing, I learned that one thing was a priority in terms of interest and emphasis: color. So, while the pictures I made a month ago were originally rendered in black and white, and the originals made in 1996 were made also using black and white, this new series will be in color.

Of course, there's some back story to this change. In 1996 I was only a black and white photographer. I did not even consider color in those days. It wouldn't be for another 6 years that color would begin to work its way into my process. And now, I am primarily a colorist photographer, meaning much of my work is about color. For instance:

Great Salt Lake, Utah 09.2016 

So here I am, referencing work made 20 years ago, returning to the scene to make pictures there again when I came across this:

Here is the first in the Portland Series from 1996 and intended as a wake up call to the fact this was first time I made series work in bright sunlight and the first series I'd made at all in 12 years. Here's the original: Portland, Maine 1996 

And here is the same building this past week. With one tree larger and one tree gone, still bookended by a vehicle left and right, still looking like it's posing with a smile on its face, waiting to be photographed, perpetually sunny in disposition even though there may be doom and gloom around the corner. Made my day, of course, coming across this after so long.

Let me posit something for minute. Imagine using a thing you did long ago becoming the reference for what you do now. Imagine using that precedent you established, not someone else, but you, out on your own, making something that forms the basis for a thing you make now. You could be a potter,  an architect, a musician, a writer, doesn't matter. How would that thing you did back then influence what you are making now? And conversely, how does what you are making now affect the thing you made in the past? Is the older piece seen now through a different lens, informed by this newer interpretation? Of course, here we are looking at these two projects, one made and one in the making, from an internal perspective, that would be me, the artist making the pictures. What about the external? Someone coming to these two bodies of work from the outside, as you are. Would you choose to reflect back on yourself twenty years ago, asked to go there by looking at these pictures? Can I do that, light a path to that way of thinking, reflecting on you, the you you were then? I hope so.

In my current Creative Practice class at the Griffin Museum we are doing just that. Talking about and discussing ways to imbue pictures with meaning, to make our work resonate and vibrate with import, with things to say or question going beyond the boundaries of a photographic document as a depiction. My class is experienced and accomplished people working within the broad definition of photography who have a real history of creative expression.

Back to the pictures and to color.

I can't help but be reminded of photographer Harry Callahan's statement that we always make the same picture. That early work isn't less or inferior and newer work isn't more or better, that it is all part of the work we make. That means, of course, that we own it all, flaws and all, as much as we might like to dismiss what we think of as lesser work, or work made through a series of bad decisions, perhaps shown and published, even though we wish it hadn't been. This is true for us all.

Who would have thought that going back to Portland twenty years later could have  brought so much to the surface? Not me. My idea behind going back to photograph 20 years later really came about because I was curious about what it would look like, what changes there would be to the neighborhood. Little did I know.

Portland, Maine. Great town, btw. Much more alive and culturally active now than 20 years ago. If you go and like BBQ, check out Salvage.