I wrote this back in late September but never published it. Now, with it being 16 degrees out, windy and gray with a dusting of snow on the ground it seems like a good time to put a little summer color out there.

What if you had trained to be a painter? What if you were a colorist way back in your twenties when you were spray painting very large canvases with huge areas of solid colors? What if you then switched to photography and stayed with it through 30 years of  black and white prints you made in your darkroom? What if you then changed to the new world of digital printmaking and then a few years later to shooting with a digital camera?

You'd probably still be a colorist at heart, right? Maybe not always, but sometimes. 

Windsor Fair, Maine 2014

I know, there's something else going on in some of these besides color. They're a little scary and twisted, yes?

My brother-in-law Marc Harrison, who died of ALS years ago, always said he hated Disney cartoons and I agree. He claimed he'd been traumatized by watching them in movie theaters as a kid. Cartoons like Dumbo and Pinocchio, where parents are killed and a little kid has to fend for himself. I tend to agree.

Stay warm.

For this end of the year look at the best of 2014 I have decided to choose one photograph from each month. Can you imagine? I am not looking for sympathy here but out of the thousands upon thousands of pictures I have made this past year for  someone who works primarily in series this has proven to be almost impossible task.

What did I do? I just plunged in. I spent several hours just going through what I'd shot. If you photograph a lot, try it. There probably are as many interpretations of what you did this past year as there are photographs you made, but it is a worthwhile and challenging exercise.

Here we go:January: from Nantucket, visiting friends.

February: I was staying in Santa Rosa about 1 1/2 hours north of San Francisco and drove back east over the mountains to photograph in the Central Valley. This was from the air.

March: I made three large bodies of work while in California last winter. I photographed the rock formations called "Tafoni" along the coast, made aerial photographs inland and made pictures of skate parks, this one in Healdsburg.

April: by April I was back home and began photographing at a place called Costume World in Fitchburg, MA. Wigs, masks, some mannequins. This work will be shown at 555 Gallery in September, 2015.

May: I was back on Martha's Vineyard. This is one I make often, with a very long lens. It is of the clay cliffs at Aquinnah (Gay Head).

June: By then I was at Penland in North Carolina teaching. This is from the town Marion nearby.

July: I returned to The Palouse to photograph wheat, near Pullman, WA. This from the air.

August: in Boston, from my bike, near Fenway Park.

September: From the National Museum of Medicine and Health in Maryland.

October: back at Martha's Vineyard. This one from the tip of the small island Chappaquidick from the air.

November: I was in Europe and friends took me up to their place on the side of a mountain in the Italian Alps.

December: from Somerville, back home again.

I had a very good year. In this period of my life I have no job to go to and few requirements or demands placed upon me. Making art resides in the center of all I do; my activity, my travel, my thoughts, my concentration, my wishes. This is a remarkable gift, of course, that I can do this, and I try to not take any of it for granted, as it is completely what I have always wanted throughout my long career. To be free to make pictures like this is a sincere privilege. I hope some of my own experiences can benefit you in yours. I enjoy sharing my work with you and hope you enjoy looking at my photographs. 

I wish you the very best in this coming year, 2015.

I don't know about you but I tend to be a little skeptical when it comes to miracles. I don't think of myself as being a tried and true cynic but some healthy perspective on things seems good to me and when confronted with a "true" miracle I tend to be wary.

But I can't really tell you what's going on here:

Presumably they sit there, hour after hour, like statues, proof that miracles do exist and that with true faith and belief in God's higher powers, anything can happen.

I am not so sure.

In Make the Work 1 we looked at taking photographs instead of making photographs and I used some pictures I made in the past day or two in Noli along the Mediteranian coast in Italy as examples.

In this one I will try to reinforce my point about working intentionally and with focus to arrive at pictures that communicate something.

I found an empty swimming pool on a pier jutting out into the water. Of course, there was a problem. It was closed and I had to jump a fence to get to it. It is often said by people wiser than I that , "ask and you shall be refused, trespass and you shall be thrown out". This was a situation where the "thrown out" part occurred but not before I got everything I needed.

This was simply so gorgeous I wanted it all in my camera right now. The trick, of course, is to slow yourself down and get the job done. This is a phase I have come to many times in a long career. It's got a "get er done" quality to it or better yet, a "Don't fuck up, Neal" .

At any rate I needed to sort it out, photograph it enough so that I wouldn't have regrets back at home later, to be thorough, and contain my beating heart that was eager to make the pictures, which I did.

Faded purple, deep blue, white and turquoise. Wow! So beautiful. Form, right angles, diagonals, depth and flatness. A Magritte-like ambivalence about projecting forward or receding back, and perfect soft light. Sometimes pictures can be such gifts. This was one of those times.

The clouds were wonderful too. These are just a start, of course. For me, the "completion" happens when I get back home and work the files and turn what I've shot into prints.

If you've followed my work awhile you know I seek to make things I photograph into series but I am not sure this is one as the subject was very reduced. For me the core pictures are the ones of the stairs. Perhaps this shoot will exist as one or two prints. We will see.

One thing I do know and it is something I can say I have been thinking about this time I've been away is that lately I have making prints in a standardized and somewhat formulaic way. Not good. Why think of each project with the same definition in terms of finalized form? It would seem to be important to follow through with prints in a size and tonality that are in sympathy with the pictures made. I will try to practice that when I return home next week.

On to Paris today and to Day 1 of Paris Photo tomorrow: Paris Photo.

Can't wait!

If you've been reading this blog for the past week or so you know I am in Europe for 2 weeks, spending most of it in northern Italy and ending up with going to Paris Photo later this week. Okay.

What you don't know is that I started this trip with a really painful back and it was marginal whether I was coming at all. I am so glad I made it as the back is improved and my friend John Rizzo and I are now in Noli, on the Mediterrean for two nights before driving up to Paris to arrive Wednesday.

The subject of this post is "Make the Work" and I hope it doesn't come off as a tirade or a rant, but for a photographer like me there are really two modes. One is taking pictures. This is really what everyone does. Maybe the photographic artist has good equipment, maybe a trained eye, maybe even aspirations to do something with the pictures beyond document a trip. But essentially, taking pictures, such as:

Definitely not art. Taken from the balcony of the place where we are staying, it uses photography to convey information in a pleasing, descriptive way.

Now we're getting to it, for the other way is to "Make the Work". Making work, or what we used to call "making" photographs instead of "taking" photographs implies: intention, specificity, thought, possibly research, often multiple shoots, integration, editing, sequencing, passion, commitment and tremendous follow through. And this is big, very big for many of you: making the work means "COMPLETION!". OMG.... so obvious, right? But for so many investment put in leads to disappointment coming out, therefore work not getting finished.

I will show some examples of Making the Work soon but let me extend the "taking pictures" part a little. This morning we walked into town ostensibly to get coffee but brought our cameras. The weather was marginal, putting out a sort of fine mist, but it wasn't cold or windy, so we were hoping to photograph. After coffee we split up as the weather was holding. I photographed along the shore of a typical riviera-like town based on tourism and fishing, happily lining things up and liking what I was seeing. This was pretty much "taking pictures".

Casual, somewhat intentional, a little passive, perhaps some description and even some saving for posterity too (I made the last one to show my grand daughter when I get back home). Certainly practicing, oiling the machinery (me) a little as I was definitely a little rusty.

Yes, I am an experienced photographer and artist and yes, I was looking for something to invest in. But clearly I am "taking pictures" here. Nothing ventured nothing gained. As I walked along and continued, I got away from tourism central a little and into a part of town that was a little grittier and run down. That was good. And then I got to it. As soon as a I saw it I knew this was where I could "make some work".

I'll give you one hint and then bring you into the work in the next post:

Clean, simple, great form, incredible color. I almost feel like writing about it will destroy it but, quite simply, what a find!

Stay tuned to see what I did with it.