Is it true? I've never told the Cabelas story? Yes, it's true.

I am going to now.

Let your mind drift into a "what if?" category. Let it range through the world of no restrictions, no restraints, the "do whatever you like" that you use to go into when you were a kid. This is like daydreaming, of course, and something I did far too much of in Latin class in the 8th grade.

Okay.  Let me set the scene: a friend and I are driving through rural PA on one of those late summer just before going back to teaching trips. It is maybe 2006 or 7. We approach a large billboard announcing that a Cabelas store is coming up. He asks if I'd ever been to one and I respond by saying no, that I'd never heard of it. We stop and go inside and I am confronted with a sports outfitting store built on a huge scale. In the middle is what I can only describe as a taxidermy mountain of animals arranged in situ and several  smaller areas where we are transported to the Serengetti in Africa with lions and elephants and giraffes. The displays are like dioramas. They are over the top wonderful, bizarre, a little twisted and I want to photograph them. I mean really want to photograph them!

I ask at the information counter about photographing and am told to go ahead take all the pictures you want as long as there is no flash and no tripod. Good but not so good. I take some snapshots with a point and shoot digital camera.

I get back home, start teaching again, am in meetings meetings meetings all the time but Cabelas pulls at me. After several false starts I find myself on the phone with a marketing guy at the home office in Nebraska. He's asking me why I want permission to photograph in the stores when they are closed, why I need to work with a tripod and what I want to do with the pictures once made. I am prepared for that and am using my title as a professor at a prominent university to validate my intentions to make pictures that are cultural research that is based in the USA and  that I am really interested in this "museum quality experience" the company promotes about its displays. Oddly enough, he says okay. Just like that. Then he tells me how it'll work.

I am to email him a few days before I want to photograph in a given store, then I am told to arrive about 6 am at the staff entrance, sign in and go about my business until the store opens at 9 am and then clear out.  I try it out first with the closest store to me at the time which is outside Hartford, CT and it works fine. I shoot for three hours while the employees are stocking shelves, sweeping floors and having a sales meeting that is very rah rah rah just before they open.

I am shooting with a Nikon D200 which is a far cry from equipment we use today. I am using the lights that are on in the store and I am way out of my comfort zone, dealing with white balance issues, areas that are too hot due to the floodlights in the ceiling, difficulty in getting access to some of the displays due to not being allowed over the railing, not having the the right lenses, etc. Over the next several months I make some upgrades. I move up to the new Nikon D300, the first digital camera that gave me usable files.

I am now planning the first of two dedicated trips.  My first one is early March while on spring break. I fly to Chicago and work stores in the Illinois, Indiana and lower Wisconsin region. There are about 50 or so stores in the chain. I drive, get close to a store, stay in a motel, arrive at the staff entrance at 6 am the next morning and, well, you know the rest. Each store's employees are wonderful, helping me move stuff and offering me coffee. After I am done at about 9 am I drive most of that day to the next store and repeat the same process. It being early March I hit some weather and have a not my favorite adventure with my rented minivan with no snow tires in a snow storm of epic proportions but I soldier on. In that trip I shot in four stores.

I've written about this before but I am now accruing real work. I am no longer a novice, I am becoming experienced in the topic of my interest and I am making increasingly knowledgeable pictures. All to the good. Each store is the same but different, some on a scale that it is difficult to comprehend; 250,000 square feet of store. Others are far smaller with fewer displays that interest me.

I complete that trip and the following summer fly again to shoot more stores. This time I start out in Boise, ID and hit stores in Nebraska and South Dakota. It is August and it is very hot. In all I photographed in 17 stores and to this day I cannot pass one by without going in with a camera.

We did a book of the pictures: Cabelas

The work's been shown and published quite a bit over the years. 

When I began the Cabellas projet I had no idea what the outcome would be. I didn't really even know why I wanted to do it. I believe we are just as novice as anybody else when we start out. It is important to acknowledge that and to face up to the fact that you will make mistakes and have false starts. But, soldier on and trust your instincts as they're probably the best thing you've got. 

Cabellas is on the site: Cabelas

Odd to be posting new pictures made almost two years ago but I have spent the last week or so resurrecting this now older work into prints and I am very excited about them.

Forti Dei Marmi

That is a link to the full series but I will give you a few here too:

I think of these as being indulgent as they are so filled with the love of color... but I am getting ahead of myself.

In the fall of 2012, still enjoying the newness of being retired, a friend and I made a trip to Italy to stay with close friends who were having a delayed honeymoon in a small house in the hills in Voldottavo, about 20 minutes from Lucca in central Italy. Would I work? Would I make pictures? Could I pull that off in the middle of vacationing, being a tourist, shopping, eating, drinking copious amounts of wine, laughing a lot and overall having a great time? As I packed up my full kit in Cambridge prior to leaving, which includes several lenses, tripod, laptop computer and hard drives, I thought I would soon find out.

How do we resolve this? This desire to go someplace wonderful and then deal with the conflict of the fact that if it is so wonderful, we have this desire and need to make pictures? Luckily for me, I had in my traveling friend, Marybeth, someone who understands this need and is amazingly helpful in letting me go do what I need to do. Without her these pictures would not have been made. Marybeth isn't an artist, but she sure gets my need to make pictures and I am everlastingly grateful for that.

I made four bodies of work while there:

Luna Park

Trees

Rivalta

and now printed, Forti Dei Marmi. You tell me? How'd I do?

The deal we struck, Marybeth and I, was that we would go if I could get back to Trieste where I'd shot the stands of trees three years earlier about 30 minutes west of the city near Palmanova. I'd made a series of pictures there in 2009 (Trees, 2009) and I very much wanted to be there again with a camera to make a series  in color.

So, here I was in Forti Dei Marmi, an Italian seaside resort, which was very trendy, posh and managed, with my friends shopping as it was market day and me wandering around, camera in hand, looking for pictures to make. I found myself down by the beach. As so often happens, pictures began to unfold and reveal themselves to me as I walked about. First it seemed to be about the sand and how it is always manicured at "paid" beaches in Italy. Yes, there are public and paid beaches in Italy. The paid ones are always made perfect at the start of each day with tractors dragging along behind them a rake that disappears the previous day's foot prints. So, I worked with that for a while. The sand was flat and rich in middle tan/gray, contrasting with the changing rooms in bright bright colors.

So, from the sand there are one or two transitionals, pictures I make to help get me from one idea to another in a series.

"It was one of those days where if you stood out there looking at the meeting of the water and the sky, if you just let your senses relax and take in this light, this color, this sound, you could, yes, it true, you could feel like you were able to see forever and be at peace with yourself."

I wrote that in the evening after we were back at our hillside home, sitting outside under the trellis at the table where we were about to have a wonderful meal. 

From there we move on to these, printed as pairs:

The pictures move on then to a Pantone wheel of colors, the changing rooms paid beach goers rent to put on their swim suits in the summer:

For me, Forti Dei Marmi was good, very very good, short but sweet.  It took me almost two years to get to it, but with it being 8 degrees outside as I write this on December 31st in Cambridge, MA it feels great to put my mind back to a perfect, and warm, day in Italy. 

Hope you enjoy it.

I've posted a new series on the site called : Spring & Fall. This is a body of work that I wrote about on my blog called New Way and New Way 2. In the New Way posts I was wrestling with a group of pictures in the making, trying to figure out if I had a new series, thinking through how to make them and so on. I am learning that the blog can serve as a kind of guide for me. A way to put something out as a test, to see if it has viability. Please understand, for me to post a series on the site, to give it that level of public exposure, I want to be firmly committed to it. As I've spent the last two weeks printing these pictures I find I am committed to the body of work.

"Spring & Fall" uses the two seasons as metaphors for early life and late life, life in ascendency and a life in decline, meaning my own. While I would argue that I am very much in this life, active, involved and astute, I cannot deny that more of my best work lies behind me than ahead. So, this series reflects on this fact. I have subtitled the series, "Sun" for the spring half and "Setting" for the fall part.

I refer you to the site for the full series: Spring & Fall

Spring

Fall

The work has several layers, several structures imposed upon it to give it definition and purpose. I don't believe I will destroy the series by giving you some of mine, but you may find others. Color for spring,  black and white for fall. I have been doing this for a while now, putting color and black and white pictures together in varying ways. This is strictly against the old rules but we are in a different world now and the old rules definitely no longer apply. If you've been following what I've been writing you know the title must be a metaphor for all the pictures in the series were made in the same two week period in May. It may be a stretch but it is one I have made and that is that the color aerial ones imply an "above" character, a flight above the ground, which is light, weightless, free and without limitation. The pictures imply freedom to go anywhere and do anything, which I associate with real youth. Whereas the black and white pictures I made on the ground, in fog, are firmly mired in the ground, without much of an ability to escape, to get out, to be free or, in fact, to go anywhere else. Pretty dire, right? But the black and white pictures are also a far more evolved and thought through group of photographs. This is another thing I associate with older people. They know more! And can understand subtlety and nuance that goes right by most young people. The two ways of photographing are so inherently different this too serves as a way to emphasize the speed, quickness and "flighty-ness" (sorry, I couldn't resist) verses the grounded, perhaps somber nature of the old, moving ponderously and with deliberation. 100 miles an hour skimming 500 feet above someplace verses walking around looking , thinking, analyzing, placing. Too much? You decide. But getting older is much like that. Ones aspirations may be great but ones ability to do things is increasingly severely limited. Why use the subtitles  "Sun" and "Setting"? To further indicate the path through the pictures and reinforce the actual title. As an aside, I have never wanted anything I have written as titles or as texts hanging along with my work in shows to be anything but clarification and this is true here with this series. I hate the texts in museums that hang next to the piece explaining, presumably to the clueless, what the work is all about. It seems condescending and overly educational. I will most likely write a blog about titles and what they can mean and what I believe is good practice for titles and what is not.  But suffice it to say here that the title for this work provides the key to the work. Important? Very.

Thank you for following my work and for being subscribers (if you are). I am grateful that I have people that care enough to look, read and think about what I make. Please feel free to respond via email.

This is the second in a series of posts about the wheat pictures I've been making since 1993. In this one we'll take a look at the color 8 x 10 pictures I began making in 2001 and then finish with early aerials.

By 2001 I had made pictures in the Palouse region of Washington for several years.  I would fly out from Boston where I live, rent a car, book a motel, and spend most days on dirt farm roads looking for things to photograph with the 8 x 10 camera. Most trips were for ten days or so. In 2001 I brought with me ten sheets of Fujichrome Provia color transparency film. This was big. Why? Because for the previous thirty years all my photography had been in black and white. 

That summer I shot the 10 sheets of the color slide film and underexposed all 10 sheets. Clearly, if I was to work in color in 8 x10 I needed to get my shit together. So over the next nine months while teaching I practiced, shot film and worked on understanding color exposure and filtration better. By the time I was headed back to Washington to photograph in the summer of 2002 I felt confident I knew what I was doing.I shot about 50 sheets of Fuji that trip.So here I was photographing the fields in color and black and white too, although I was now less interested in those. I was interested in photographing wheat in color because color was fundamental to where I was and hugely different depending on when I was there. What also happened, of course, was that color started to slip into all the shooting I was doing. I was even shooting color series work in 120mm the way I had shot series work in black and white for twenty years. In short, big changes were afoot as the old rules no longer applied. There have been many things that have happened over my career that have reinvigorated my photography. Color at this time was one of them.

There's a catch and that is that there really wasn't a way to realize the color I was shooting in any high quality manner. Inkjet printing simply wasn't good enough yet, I hated C prints as they looked plasticky and veiled, Cibachromes were expensive and the chemistry was very bad. About the only way to see these was to print them at school using the Fuji printer we had, which used two rolls to make a print: a receiver sheet and a transfer sheet. It was good but the downside was that the printer only printed to 11 x 17 inches and each time you made a print it cost about $15.

It wasn't really until about 2003 or 2004 that I was able to realize these 8 x 10 inch transparencies as good prints that were large enough. I had several shows in those years at Studio Soto Gallery in Boston that highlighted this work. The prints were typically 4 x 5 feet and were inkjet prints.

Early Aerials

Since there is room I'll move now into telling about the early days of shooting the wheat fields from the air. I'll conclude this series of posts in Wheat 6 with more current aerials.

One of the trips I took out to the Palouse in the late 90's had me flying to Seattle and then flying back east to Pullman on a small turbo prop plane. This meant we were flying over much of the country I had been shooting from the ground. As the plane was low enough and it was clear enough I had a look for the first time at what the area looked like from the air. I decided then that I should see if I could  find a way to make some aerial photographs of the fields. 

A few days later I met Doug Gadwa. He owned a small air charter business at the Pullman airport. He told me he could take me up for an hour or so and that he had a Cessna high winged plane that had a removable back seat with a small plate in the floor that could be unscrewed. This would allow me to shoot straight down.

The only camera I had with me that might work was the Hasselblad Superwide (SWC). The next day, up we went. They had removed the rear seat for me and I lay on my stomach in front of a 4 inch square hole in the floor, looking straight down. I could either look through the hole to the ground sliding by us below or stick the camera in the hole to take a picture, but couldn't do both at the same time.

This is what the pictures looked like:

As it turned out the Superwide was a wonderful camera for photographing this way as it was wide and its 38 Biogon lens was very very sharp.

After that trip I began thinking of working aerially as simply being part of the way that I made pictures in Washington. What came next? Color, of course:

OMG! These pictures blew me away. I was so excited (and to be honest, terrified when up in the plane) by this way of working that in later years when I had made the switch to digital it seemed very natural to just make aerials wherever I thought there was the potential for good photographs. This was just as true in Utah in 2010:

as it was in Massachussetts when I got it in my head that I wanted to photograph islands off the coast that were private and inaccessible (MA Islands) in 2009. 

So, where does that leave us in the scheme of the Wheat pictures? Well, there is more story to tell and in the next installment in the Wheat series I'll write about my change from film to digital. We all know that this has been a revolution in how still photographs are made, but in my case moving to digital capture allowed me to make pictures I never could have before.

Wheat 3 coming up next. Stay with me.

I've  been photographing cars for a very long time. My undergraduate thesis at RISD in 1969 (if that doesn't date me nothing will) was a group of pictures I made in a junkyard south of Providence.

I did some work in 8 x 10 in junkyards in black and white over the 20 or so years I worked in that format. More recently I have been photographing on and off in car shows, most notably the Worcester Nationals every summer in MA and in the winter last year at a large show in Yuma, AZ (2012):

I have also gone to many of the local "meets" that spring up all over the US on Saturday afternoons in the summer in malls, parking lots and drive-ins. 

I have two comments to make on this work. One is that there are some people photographs here.  This is rare for me. The question I get about my work more than any other is, "Do you photograph people?" 

Clearly I do, but not often and not easily. Working fast isn't my best area photo-graphically. Too many years with a 30 lb. camera mounted on a tripod in front of me, shooting outdoors, my head under a dark cloth and with a very slow shutter speed and a very small f stop. The other comment I have on this work is that, and forgive me if this sounds pompous, I have wanted to raise the bar on this genre. Everyone that goes to these shows brings a camera but not everyone makes photographs. I try to. Check out the Car Show series (car show) on the site and then let me know if you think I've succeeded (Neal Rantoul email)