The photographer sits at his desk on the island in the house he owns with his two sisters. It is a mid sixties Eliot Noyes designed house with a broad view of the south coast of the island as it is sited high up on a hill overlooking a mile of land before the shore with a view all the way out to the horizon. He has spoken before how this location is partially responsible for an aesthetic long on horizontality over now a career of making landscape photographs. 

2012

Faced with hip surgery soon, he finds himself unable to do things he used to take for granted. He is still able to make pictures that connect and have force, though perhaps the car is parked nearby or the picture is made close to the road, for walking isn't easy. But his fluidity with his medium is due to decades of work looking and making pictures of what he sees.

He has made new pictures at the the other end of the island in a remote place where soil erosion is winning the battle against a stand of trees.The ocean is at its most powerful here and a cut in the point of sand has wreaked havoc where the waves meet the land. 

2014

In several flights to photograph the island over the past three years, he has been struck by how much this particular landscape has been transformed. As the bluff erodes the trees have no choice but to fall, one by one. This time he drove to the end of the dirt road, parked and walked along the strip of trees, looking out at the ocean as it ripped around the outermost bend in the island. 

As is typical for him, he found himself interested in wildly different content looking out and in, a 180 degree metaphor for the external and internal lives we all lead.

This work, some new and some now three years old, is forming in his head as a project that will look at a piece of island land both from the air and also on the ground. This will be his third such project, and seems surprising to him that this isn't done by others here. This sense one has of what the place really looks like from the air as in a kind of survey contrasted with what is perceived of the individual choices he makes as he works throughout the land on foot. One almost objectified and the other highly personal, almost intimate. The place versus his place. Like that.

These two from a series in 2014 that looked at Tom's Neck from the ground (well, actually, from the water as he made these while in a kayak) and from the air.

These are from the island of Chappaquidick near the Dyke Bridge.

The other project made here, the first, is: Spring and Fall

As he sits at his desk as the light fades from the day writing and thinking about these photographs and all his work made here on the island, he finds the challenge of making new work of this landscape to be difficult but also extremely rewarding. One of his teachers long ago, Aaron Siskind, who also photographed here, said to him that the place was only an island, meaning that you would inevitably run out of material here. The photographer has at times worked hard here and at other times not at all but he finds now there are still things to do on this island. 

He is very fortunate to live at least part of the year in a place of such beauty and diversity. 

He chooses to end with these, in black and white now, of the trees that fell and haven't yet been swept away by winter storms. And the last picture, forecasting a very different season approaching.

The photographer is represented by 555 Gallery in Boston. Please contact Susan Nalband, the gallery owner, with any questions about this work or any other by the photographer who happens to be named Neal Rantoul.

Of course you can always email me and I welcome your comments: Neal's email

After now almost two months of working on the new prints called Monsters  for the show coming up in September at 555 Gallery in Boston titled "Wild Thing" I have learned a few things and I thought I'd share my experience with you.

Making prints from a project, be it for a portfolio or for an exhibition, is a process. There are steps, necessary as an evolutionary process, that must be taken. These are things that can't be rushed or corners cut to get to a final result. This is true at least for me. I believe it is very important to set enough time aside for these steps to happen. I started working on the new Monsters pictures around July 4. They are now finished with the last step being to move them to the gallery, unpack them and hang the show. So, my personal process of editing, printing, reprinting, changing sizes or cropping, reprinting, mounting and then framing is now about to go into a more public process of interaction, final editing, and working with the gallery to hang the work. Then, finally, when the show opens my work goes public. But as this progresses from singular decisions and all the results inherent in that to a more public place my role is no longer active. In some sense, the job being finished, my role is over. I just need to show up.

The Monsters show, framed and packed for moving to the gallery.

This is all good, of course. I am honored and privileged to be allowed to take my work through this process and I am indebted to 555 Gallery for the opportunity. For a sense of perspective, much of my career was spent making work with no clear objective in sight, no place to show it, no one expressing an interest in it or, in fact, even knowing it existed. But what I've learned or it seems relearned is that while the gains are large, that I am showing new work soon, there are losses too. This whole "print for a show" thing? In this case, it was all consuming. Not much time off, few new photographs made, few laughs and fun times and, whatever work I did make,  made without enough concentration. 

Where there have been other activities going on they have centered around making a catalogue for the show, sending to press the Essays on Photography book that is being printed now, and some advance publicity for the show. There are now even Moo cards made of  the Monsters work:

Why? For the sheer fun of it. Also, I've been dealing with theses images and more in large sizes for so long it's great to be able to see the cast of characters in cards, as these have become my coconspirators, my friends. Suffice it to say, we are very close. If you see me, ask to see my cards.

While proud of the new work and looking forward to is unveiling, I am missing time spent on making new work. To that end, there is some travel coming up that should put things back on course. Coming up in a week or so I fly to Salt Lake City, Utah to make aerial photographs of the salt flats and the shoreline of Great Salt Lake.Thanks to Google Earth I can show you where I am headed:

Can't wait. 

I'll be back for the opening at 555 Gallery September 12. 

Hope to see you there.

Do you go back? Do you delve into past work? Either from a few months ago or farther back in time, maybe in years?

Let me tell what I do that's not all that good. I go on a big trip to photograph somewhere. If you know me at all you know I work every day. I get up with charged batteries (figuratively but also factually) and formatted cards. Off I go on the day's shoot. Each night I go over the files on a laptop, perform a very rough edit, back up the RAWS  on a separate hard drive, format the card and charge the battery to start the next day ready to go.

When I come back from the trip I download the files and begin to look at them. I decide which ones I will print, usually in series, and I begin the work. After a month or two I have several bodies of work that are complete. I show the work around to colleagues,  friends and to Susan Nalband at 555 Gallery where I exhibit my work, and then move on to the next project. Done.

Not so fast. Are what I have worked with the definitive photographs from what I shot? Have I made the best choices? Have I missed something? Very possibly. And what if I've moved on to new projects, new things I am shooting that I am excited by and that I want to see as prints? 

If you are always moving on to the next project are you leaving work behind that has real merit or significance? Is it possible that the way you printed them or showed them is not allowing the work to exist at its best, or perhaps in some way that brings new insight into the work that you hadn't dealt with the first time around? 

Does any of this matter? To wonder whether or not you've made good work you haven't brought front and center? Truthfully, probably not. In the realm of things going on in the world like disasters, wars, senseless killings, poverty, rampant injustice and inequality, your and my pictures most likely are not a ripple on the ocean of everything. It only really matters if it matters to you. The way I play this is to work to remember what I was thinking as I made the pictures. As I stood there in front of something and worked with it. Thinking of the potential of this, or the sequencing of that. Thinking of how the prints would look like this or this. Trying to figure out how to make sense of the work. Was I shooting it all, did I get everything I needed? To remember the level of commitment to the work as I made it.  If I can do that and it was high then it is a no brainer. I will print the work. 

So at this stage in my career one of my primary concerns is not to fuck it up. Inspiration's easy for it flows like a tap with no on or off. Seriously, give me a blank room, four walls a ceiling and a floor, and I'll do something with it. But I am perfectly capable of being somewhere amazing and missing something or shooting something wrong just a little to make for a disaster when back home. 

At any rate, pay a little respect to past work not realized. Make the effort on that cold winter night when the wind is howling and the temperature's in the single numbers outside and you can't go shooting. Go back to that day last summer when the air was like honey on your face and you came across that place that was magic, you knew it was. It is so rare that all is right. Perfect light, angle, perspective and your ability to  work with it. You worked around it and with it like a dancer, at one with what it was and your growing perception of it. You knew it was good and you were on. Let that work come out. Share that work with us.

From Italy, Trees, 2012

There is a tendency, of course, to think that much old work isn't as good as what you shot today. Not true. Harry Callahan, one of my teachers, had a nice way of    quashing that one. He said that he thought we really made the same picture all the time or that we really only made one picture through all our work. He prescribed equal weight to early work made when he didn't know much and to work made late in his career when he'd made countless really important photographs. 

Go back.

Lying there in a field, thrown away, reminding me of Richard Misrach's dead animals thrown into a pit in Nevada under very suspicious circumstances. The series, called "Desert Cantos" starts off this way:

On March 24, 1953, the Bulloch brothers were trailing 2000 head of sheep across the Sand Springs Valley when they were exposed to extensive fallout from a dirty atomic test. Within a week first ewes began dropping their lambs prematurely– stunted, woolless, legless, potbellied. Soon full-grown sheep started dying in large numbers with the same symptoms — running sores with large pustules, and hardened hooves. Horses and cattle were found dead with beta burns. At final count, 4,390 animals were killed.

photograph by Richard Misrach

To be clear, Misrach offers no answers but uses these pictures to analogize about the atomic bomb testing the US did in this area in the 50's and 60's. Miscrach made his pictures in 1987.

The question occurs to me that I probably couldn't have or wouldn't have made these pictures of uprooted evergreens in a North Carolina tree farm if it hadn't been for Misrach's pictures serving as precedent.

I know, they are only trees, right? There is no real tragedy here. Or is there?

Think about this. I made these late one morning with a gentle rain falling in rural North Carolina in March 2015. We stopped, realizing what we were about to drive right past. Out in a field, uprooted, chopped down and left there what, to be fed into a chipper or buried like Misrach's corpses? What a waste. Sad, really.

Grown to be sold to be a centerpiece in a family's homage to Jesus Christ's birth on December 25th? Or, depending on your point of view, to be cut, bought, brought inside, covered in plastic lights, draped with fake snow and tinsel with gifts from Walmart strewn around its base to be ripped open by children in a feeding frenzy on Christmas morning. Hard sometimes not to be cynical.

I'd like to bend this work and the idea of life cut short into a piece about how our contemporary times ruin everything. How we live in a disposable society and throw what we don't want away. But it's just isn't true. This particular carnage of some evergreens in North Carolina isn't about "now" and the cheapness of things in 2015. For it is universal, isn't it? There is nothing particularly timely about these pictures. We've been ruining things since mankind started.

At any rate, I wrote this pessimistic view last week when it was rainy and cold and New England was relentlessly hanging on to winter. By Saturday the sun had broken out, the temperature was higher and I spent all day at the Griffin Museum mentoring photographers and looking at some very fine work that affirmed my point of view that there is good in humanity after all. 

It didn't hurt that I had beer and a burger that night with Frances and Paula from the Griffin. We told stories and laughed and life was good again.

(Note: these were photographs authored by me, Neal Rantoul, but assigned the pseudonym, Marc Meyer.)

This is the second time we've shown work on the site by the young photographer Marc S. Meyer. Marc lives near Baltimore but photographs frequently in New England. To read more about him and his work go here.

Marc writes about the photographs:

I’d seen this abandoned building from the road earlier in the fall and marked it on the car’s GPS so I could return. I picked a day in early January where the cloud cover was heavy and there was snow in the forecast. When I arrived the air was still and electric with the coming storm. I worked for several hours in the cold, returning to the car to warm up and look over the pictures on the back of my camera that I’d just made. There wasn’t a soul in sight, only the occasional sound of a car going by on the two-lane road nearby.


The sky was important as it would serve as the drama needed for the pictures but I also wanted it to have visual weight. This was tripod work, as I would combine several frames of the same scene into one image later on in post processing.

Of course, no artist knows if he will be successful if an image or a few of his images will be seen as important in a larger context. One can only hope. But these few large photographs are intended to represent the first half of the equation or analogy, if you will. Man made structures decay if left on their own outdoors. Fact. This large warehouse made to take care of a region’s municipal needs outside the small town of Baldwinville is also a fact. But we seem to have no problem making something, using it and then discarding it when we no longer need it. We do it every week when we take out the trash.

As a large issue this building sitting empty and forlorn outside a small town in rural Massachusetts serves for me as an example of skewed priorities. Used and thrown away.

On a smaller issue and on a more personal scale, I have always found photography’s ability to beautify fascinating. I would doubt if “beauty” came up much when the architects and/or engineers were designing this building. But there it sits; empty, discarded, dismissed and beautiful.

This work is deceptively simple, almost minimal. The prints are large, at 30 x 24 inches and unusual in their depth and tonal range. 

Assigning such nobility to what is, in effect, a piece of junk is of course Marc's point.

But then he takes us inside the structure, almost as though we're headed into a tomb.

and ends with:

That's it. The series seems to end even though it just got started. No frills here. I've said this before but: get in, get it done and get out. That's what Marc did here and the reduction serves the overall purpose of the group of pictures: the force of their impact, their remarkable color palette, their emphasis on containing information both within and without the building.

Marc Meyer seems to be moving on from his rather straight representation of the small world of the Beach Club pictures to a more interpretive and subjectified manner of expression. It's as though he is using the warehouse building in these pictures as a springboard to reflect his changing views and perhaps, to flex his muscles. 

Does it work? Do you find these photographs compelling? Let us know at: Neal's Email

Marc's work is now available for viewing at 555 Gallery in Boston. The Beach Club portfolio and this one (Baldwinville, MA) are in the gallery's flat files. I urge you to take a look at the prints in these two portfolios as this is very strong work. A blog is a wonderful thing but used as a vehicle to look at art? It is is just perhaps the first step. Prints are king.