Robert Pirsig 1927-2017
Dead at 88 years old. One of my heroes, as he wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I read in about 1977. Perhaps you read it too. I didn't understand some of it, but the idea of turning a road trip across America on a motorcycle into to an existential pursuit of self and the meaning of life sure did appeal.
Along with Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and a few others, including Looking at Photographs by John Szarkowski and On Photography by Susan Sontag, these books formed a foundation of pursuit, enquiry and aesthetic maturation for me and, I am sure, many others from my generation.
Because of this blog and the need to go back into my creative life and its projects, I am able, for the first time, to see my own development taking place in my work. This is now reflected in the talks and presentations I give and in my writing for the introductions to the series works books we are making.
But Pirsig rocked my world. I remember this wonderful description he gave us of assembling his 4 x 5 view camera, placing it on his tripod and trying to capture the grandeur of the expanse of a Kansas field with 360 degrees of open sky and flowing wheat, then packing it up and riding away with no pictures made, understanding the medium's limitations and his struggle to put his feelings into photographs.
That story from his book certainly was in my mind as I was making this picture in 2009 in the Palouse in SE Washington.
Apologies for this odd sort of eulogy but I offer it in the spirit of the loss we have suffered in his passing. I owe Mr. Pirsig a debt of gratitude for his generosity in sharing his thoughts and experiences and am thankful for the richness of what he wrote.
Rest well, Robert Pirsig.
Related series
Wheat, Washington 2010
I have been photographing in this southeastern corner of Washington for over fifteen years. The area, called “The Palouse” is hundreds of square miles of wheat, lentils, safflower. etc. I first began making pictures here in black and white 8 x 10 in the 90’s, then added color in 2000, beginning to work aerially about the same time and now make all my pictures digitally. I also return in different seasons as the landscape changes drastically depending on what stage the crops are in. As there is so much work from this area, we have chosen to show work from several different trips or shoots and to change them out from time to time. The group shown here is from a trip I made in August 2010.
Wheat 2014 Form
Artist Statement: Wheat
Neal Rantoul
I first started photographing in the Palouse area of southeastern Washington in the mid 90’s and have been back most years since. It is my longest running project.
The work has evolved over the years, going from first black and white to color, from large format to digital, and from being based on the ground to including pictures made from the air. I have also photographed the area through the seasons.
In earlier writing about the project I referenced some of the great contemporary landscape photographers such as Robert Adams and Joe Deal, who was a good friend, and also cited Eugene Atget for the single mindedness of his intent. As a career artist I work in many different genres but this is the one that is perhaps the core vehicle of expression for my landscape work. While it has been challenging to find new approaches to this most wonderful of places, it also has been a privilege. Looking back at so much work now, I see more subtle changes from the earlier days to the present for I believe some of the basic principles in working there still apply: it is a landscape almost without scale due to few trees and little to reference size, the pictures can convey the movement of the wheat in the breeze at the same time as show the stillness and static nature of the topography, allowing photographs that convey sharpness and blur due to movement in the same image simultaneously and finally, in the more recent work since about 2000, colors, on their own, but also in relationship to each other.
I am very excited by the newest work from the summer of 2014, as it represents a shift in intention with an evolved sense of the fields' function and their form where the work is perhaps its most abstract. Some of this work references the place by including a barn, a farm machine or trees, while some does not. Hence: Function and Form, the title for the new work. Function and Form constitutes a subset, which is, I hope, a powerful one, of the overall work made over the two-week shoot.
Neal Rantoul
July 2014
Wheat, Washington 2011
This is the third of the bodies of work from the southeastern corner of the state of Washington called "The Palouse" represented on the website. As I write this now in August, 2012 I am working on a new group from a trip made in late July.
The photographs from this 2011 trip were made in mid May, a very different time in the region. It is very early in the growing season and the crops are either just showing bright green or are still turned under from the previous winter and are bare. There are also some fields that are the stubble remaining from the previous harvest in the fall.
As usual, I stayed about a week and photographed from the air as well as on the ground.
We will post the new 2012 wheat field pictures soon.
