I just got back from a couple of days on the island of Martha's Vineyard.  The afternoon I arrived went rapidly downhill to an evening that had fierce rain, flash floods and tree-branch-breaking winds. By the next morning the rain had ceased but the wind was still up.  At 8 or so I drove up island to the Chilmark town beach called Squibnocket where all hell was breaking loose.

The waves were pounding into shore in rapid succession.

To photograph this was way out of my comfort zone. I don't usually shoot stuff that  moves. What did I do? Answer: the best I could.

If you've been to Squibnocket, the waves were washing right across the parking lot. 

Of course, I loved all of it.

After that I drove to Vincent's Beach, farther down the south side of the island.

Where the waves had created sea foam, like whip cream. 

While walking in I came across another photographer walking out, camera on a tripod just like me. In an odd sort of way it was like coming across myself. He pointed to his wet pants and said to be careful the waves were coming right up the beach. I thanked him, walked down the beach a ways, plunked my tripod down in the sand, looked through the long lens on my camera and started shooting. Guess  what happened next?

Before I knew what hit me I was knee deep in a wave washing ashore. So much for "watching out."

This is what it looked like that morning at Vincent's:

This beach where the summer people slather on sun block, kids build sand castles, lawyers and stockbrokers waddle out with their Sunday New York Times to soak up the rays and body surf the waves. This high-end beach looking now very different and really deadly. 

This is the second post I am writing about recovering from surgery and thinking about pictures. The first, 11 Days Out is here.

In 2012 and 2013 I extensively photographed  the forty miles of sand dunes in the southern California dessert called the Imperial Sand Dunes, nearby Yuma, Arizona. I hiked them, drove over them in a jeep, photographed them from the perimeter road, shot them from the air several times and even rented an ATV one day to be able to get further in to these massive dunes that can be as high as 300 feet.

As is my practice, I made prints into portfolios from the two trips I made to photograph the dunes. They sit in my studio now printed on 22 x 17 inch Canson Baryta Photographique paper. Each portfolio combines aerials with ground based work.They look good and present the extended shoots well. But there is a major flaw in this work and one I am guilty of in other bodies of work where I make pictures over years and several trips (my Wheat work comes to mind). Working this way, printing in response to new work made lends no perspective or focus to the work, it is just a compiling of what I think are the best pictures made. Making separate portfolios from different years becomes an artificial construct and succeeds in only separating and diminishing the work. So, I've decided to change that.

I've been working to consolidate, edit tightly and make one new portfolio of finished work from both years. Note the added benefit of now being at least 3 years from it. MUCH better to have some distance. Here are a few that will be included

It's shame that I need this forced down time to concentrate on this work. But I know once I get back on my feet I'm going to be shot from a cannon, on to new projects and never looking back. Perhaps this is what advanced years in a field gives you: the knowledge of how bad you're going to be at something based upon having been there so many times before. At any rate, still being on crutches forces me to slow down and focus on the Dunes work and I am thankful for that, for it is good work.

A little on the technical side here. In earlier digital days, now 10 years ago or so, the cameras weren't good enough for what I wanted my pictures to do. The file size was too small to allow larger prints of high quality. I would step the file size up using Genuine Fractals but is was a poor substitute for the larger file sizes of today. Since about when I made the Dunes pictures the first year in 2012, all that has changed. I can go back to these confident in their inherent quality and can make large prints that hold well, keep sharp, have excellent dynamic range, superb color rendition and don't get noisy. This is the maturing of the medium and it is a very good thing.

BTW: these pictures are simply remarkable (you've heard such modesty from me before, no doubt), rich and subtle and bold and refined. Notice how the color is different in each one? That's because of different days, times of days and years that I made them in. At 1.5 inches across on your smart phone you are not doing them justice. It is the print here that really counts. Over the next few days I will start production, making them on 30 x 24 inch Epson Exhibition Fiber paper. When done they will reside in a custom case with a title page and artist statement. It will be a limited edition portfolio of approximately 20 prints.They will be available for viewing at 555 Gallery in Boston. Passionate about good prints? Me too. Come see these. I mean it. Knock your socks off.

Note ( as of mid February 2016): I've just finished printing these and they are viewable on my site at: Dunes 2012 & 2013.

I am now 11 days out from having surgery to replace my left hip (the right hip was done back in November). One of the after effects of having all the drugs in you from surgery is that several of your systems are also put to sleep. For instance, your digestive track may need a kick start to begin working again. So then you are being given drugs to counteract other drugs. In there you sort of lose your mind. Not as though you go crazy but my  mind was reduced to working in a far more primal state: survival. Days are simple; eat, stay warm, drink fluids, rest. Not because you're  being told to do this but because this is all you've got. Gradually I did begin to surface, to be able to think. At about 6 days out I found myself sitting at my kitchen table one morning all alone crying my eyes out. Was I sad, was there some big tragedy on my life? Nope, just strong a wave of emotion coming to the surface having been suppressed by drugs due to surgery. I remember being really happy at this outburst, this catharsis that meant I was able to feel again.

Over the past few days, real thought has been possible. Hell, I couldn't turn thought off. Ideas springing forth, as though some tap had been turned on. Pictures to make, new ways of working to explore, places to go to photograph, past projects to print, or reprint or to bring to the front. In fact, so many ideas that I have to be careful I don't act on them in haste. I could find my condo for sale, a new car in my garage, new lenses arriving even though I have bills to pay, me owning a vacation home someplace. 

But in terms of pictures, these from 2012 popped right up:

In a three or four print series

From a small northern Italian coastal town called Forti Di Marmi.

Painted rental changing rooms on a private beach. Why? Good question. Not the deepest of pictures I have ever made but perhaps more of a sensual delight; strong colors, a fast rendition due to the sweep to the railings and ceilings pulling back to a flat plane, a sense of constancy in design within the group, variety within a common theme. At any rate, there they were demanding my attention, these pictures made  in 2012. The current plan is make large prints of them. I think of them as a sort of celebration.

While I can't show you where I am headed I can show you what I am working on as past projects to fully realize, or in one case, re-realize work made in the past to bring it to the front.

Stay tuned. 

12 Days Out coming up next. 

So, despite that I am still using crutches to walk around and not driving yet, I don't think I'd be going out much to shoot today anyway. This is what my outdoor thermometer said this morning.

OMG!

We all have special places, places that have key meaning to us for a variety of reasons: where you proposed marriage, where you were when you heard of the 9/11 attacks, where you saw that moose along the edge of the river as you silently rafted down stream, that curve in the road where you almost lost it when driving too fast as a teenager in the rain that night, and so on.

For the purposes of this article I want to address our photographic special places, those that hold importance to us because of what they've meant in terms of our own development or maybe because there is something in a place that works on us in a little deeper way.

Ever find yourself someplace that you know is exceptional? A place that is extraordinary, perhaps to just you? Where the light and the air and the ground and the sky are charged with precedent and history, that whatever is there is frozen in a moment of such sublime beauty or serenity or tension that you must photograph it?

One of my special places is at the top of Cannon Mountain in New Hampshire. I photograph it in the summer and take the tramway to the top. From there I hike to the observation tower and climb the stairs to the deck, position my camera up against the railing in the right corner, over by the coin operated binoculars. I have probably been photographing this for 15 or 20 years.

I point my longs lens here: 

2009

This saddleback of a curve, covered in trees.

2011

2015

Partially the "same but different" and partially something that connects with me at a more primal level, a place that is special for me.

My friend Peter Vanderwarker uses a painting by Thomas Cole made almost 200 hundreds years ago to reference a place called Crawford Notch in NH and wrestles with how to convey meaning, emotional weight and wonder in the present with his chosen medium, which just happens to be photography. 

This is clearly a special place for Peter. I wonder where yours are.

By the way Peter is certainly one of the top architectural photographers in this century or any other, for that matter. He is Boston based but works all over. His site is here. He also is the co-author (with Robert Campbell) of the "Then and Now"series of pictures of Boston published over many years in the Boston Globe that look back at a scene in the city shot in the 19th or early 20th centuries compared  with the same place in the present.

                                                       • • •

Is the blog back for real now? Well, I am close to two weeks out from hip replacement surgery and each day is better than the one preceding it. I leave the house now and am in physical therapy. Life is good. We will see.

Stay tuned.

The Wild Thing show at 555 Gallery in Boston is down. My work in the exhibit called Monsters is foam wrapped and back in my studio waiting for me to slide the framed prints back into the rack that will hold them. One of the truths to being an exhibiting artist is that the work goes out and most of it comes back.  

For those of you that weren't able to see the show I have put the majority of it on the gallery page of this site here. Allison Nordstrom wrote the introduction to the work for the show's catalog. If you'd like to read it here in the blog let me know.  You can contact me here. Below is the artist statement I wrote for the catalog, which is available through the books section of this site. In it I write about my growing understanding of the work I'd made. (BTW: The prevailing wisdom is that people do not really read blogs. I wonder if you do?)

Monsters

As I write this in July 2015 I am heavily immersed in the printing of the photographs for the show at 555 Gallery that has my pictures in it called “Monsters” that opens in mid September. Printing for a show like this is practically a single-minded effort that requires focus and blocking out distractions as much as possible. While I made these pictures in 2014, this is the first time they’ve been printed and shown.
Thanks to the wonderful essay by Alison Nordstrom in the catalog we have the necessary perspective placed on the work and she has contextualized it for us as well. I am thankful to her for providing that which I can’t. But I can attempt in this statement to bring you into the work and speak to motivation and intention. As far as success or the final result goes, I will leave that up to you.
On a gray and cold day in early winter I drove to Fitchburg MA to make a presentation of my work to the new head of the Fitchburg Art Museum. We had a great time and looked at several portfolios. I left thinking that that the meeting had gone well, and on the way out of town saw on my left a sign on top of a long low building that said, “Halloween Costume World”. I pulled over, parked and went in. Inside was quite dark and cold with aisle after aisle of all sorts of things. Halloween costumes for children and adults in plastic envelopes with pictures of models wearing what was contained within. A mask wall with what looked to be hundreds of latex masks stuck on sticks from floor to ceiling. A section of mannequins dressed in odd juxtapositions of monsters and tableaus of scenes like three of the major characters in the Wizard of Oz. And finally, in another huge room with no light and no heat at all, an odd storage area that included rentable full size models of Beetlejuice and a somewhat broken Frankenstein, assorted gory and macabre scenes of beheadings, the green Wicked Witch of the West, torture and executions, a wig wall filled with hundreds of all styles of inexpensive wigs placed on plastic head forms of amazing variety and so on. I was the only customer in the store that day. I walked right up to the man behind the desk and asked him if I could come back to take pictures. He said, “Yes, of course”. While the visit to present my work to the Fitchburg Museum turned out to be a complete waste of my time the visit to Halloween Costume World did not. I had a new project.

Over the next several months I returned many times to the store. The routine became familiar to me and to the staff in the store. I would arrive, ask them if they’d mind turning the lights on, haul in tripod and photo gear, set up and start to photograph. Each time I’d think I was finished after a few hours but when looking at the work made, realized I needed to go back to reshoot.
Working on a project like this, where the subject stays the same, is as much a discovery for the artist as it is for the viewer of the work. I learned this ten years ago when working on making pictures from the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia. The specimens weren’t gong anywhere but it was up to me to discover and apply my own imprint.
So, I worked, trying different approaches each time I went. By five or six trips photographing in the store, about an hour from where I live, I felt the work was getting redundant. So I stopped. By this time I understood that I had unearthed something a little more substantial than the pictures just being shocking, atypical, funny, or quirky. I found I was attributing personalities to these masks and head forms and mannequins. This started to show itself in nicknames for some of the characters. The three models shown side by side in the show are known as “Neal’s Passion” as they are very lovely and make me think of my youth. The large print of the vertical model with the surrounding dark hair is now “Mona”. Then there is “Dorothy” in several parts and interpretations. The side-by-side models with unbelievable lips are called “Pouty” and finally, the large print of the smashed mask is simply called “Jack”.
What began as an experiment in new seeing had now become, surprise surprise, meaningful. Little did I know. I thought when I started I had a hold of something that would entertain, be colorful and maybe titillate. What I found was that I had photographed something that, I believe, struck a more primal note. That what our genetics and our ancient brains do to these faces and the over-the-top expressions molded into these odd things is to indentify with them, to seek to form relationships with them, to, essentially, attribute personality to latex, plastic and fiberglass. This, I predict, is a path for human civilization to deal with if we survive, if we don’t blow ourselves up or contaminate where we live. Movies like Chappy, Ex Machina and Her all wrestle with our future relationship with machines we make in our image. Interesting times indeed.

In my own small way I too am moving ahead. My classmate and colleague, Arno Minkkenin says that “Art is risk made visible”, and, while perhaps an over simplification, it certainly seems to apply here. As a career artist I have made a leap with this work, taken some risk, to delve deeper into an area I have been wrestling with for ten years. What do we know about us from preserved forensic specimens? Or in the case of my Cabelas work, what do we learn from photographs of stuffed animals posed in situ in a large sports outfitting store? And finally, what can we assimilate about ourselves from the caricatures we make in our own image? These monsters in all their cheap and gaudy representation of the human condition, in all their gross exaggeration of much that is abhorrent about us as a race, can also be strangely beautiful and unsettling. Dichotomies are fascinating. Enigmas provoke and pose questions that hopefully go beyond $14.95 wigs and $29.95 latex Halloween masks.
Welcome to my world of Monsters.
Neal Rantoul
July 2015

It has not escaped my awareness that I am writing this practically on the eve of Halloween. Happy trick or treating and be safe out there.