In From the Archives and From the Archives 2 we looked at some work that I felt might have been missed or passed over. Being prolific has its downsides.

In From the Archives 3 we're going to look at work made over the winter of 2012. Having just retired the year before I was free to make new work. The year before I had been invited to present at the Yuma (AZ) Art Symposium, a remarkable meeting of all kinds of artists, including pin makers and jewelry artists. 

After that brief exposure. to Yuma, I decided to spend most of the next winter living there. This turned out to be a very productive time. Here are a few:

Lake Martinez

Castle Dome Mine Museum

As is often true for many of my series, Salton Sea had concurrent ideas going on at the same time. The dystopian view of a wasteland fecund and irredeemable, and an experiment of color and black and white coexisting. I could feel my teachers rolling over in their graves as I worked on the files back in Cambridge.

And last, the first year of making the Dunes pictures started that winter. The next year I spent time in San Diego with much less photographic success but did drive back to Yuma for ten days to complete the Dunes project, aerial and ground-based imagery from the Imperial Sand Dunes in California, just over the border from Yuma.

Dunes

 Just like Iceland would be for me two years later, I found the dunes a revelation; abstract, otherworldly, and very beautiful. Being freed from teaching and no longer having the duties of a full professor at a large urban university not only made going away possible but also allowed freedom of thought and immersion in what it is that I do, which is photograph.

Comments welcome.

About 10 years ago I made a set of pictures of a mostly abandoned town about an hour from Moab, Utah called Thompson Spring.

I went through them the other day. In 2019 I spent some time with them as I reprinted them. Rare for me, but I wasn't happy with the paper I printed them on originally. They now are as good as is possible, printed on Red River's San Gabriel, sadly no longer offered. A superb paper. 

This is a favorite body of work.

I wrote extensively about the series:

https://nealrantoul.com/posts/thompson-spring-utah

https://nealrantoul.com/posts/thompson-spring-utah-2

https://nealrantoul.com/posts/thompson-spring-utah-3

https://nealrantoul.com/posts/thompson-spring-utah-4

https://nealrantoul.com/posts/thompson-spring-utah-5

The prints are 25 x 17 inches. 

Suggestion:  a cup of coffee, a beer, a glass of wine, some time with no distractions, a computer with a good display, and a look over the series, then reading the posts in sequence, all 5 of them. I think you might enjoy the experience. 

Increasingly, my work is seen on line and also increasingly, with the blog as a companion; the artist's voice, if you  will. For whatever reason, the combining of technological change and an evolving sense of art's role in our lives as we see it and it being read about on screen has us seeing and interpreting art differently than ever before. Maybe not worse, but different. In my long career I've never been able to sit and have a conversation with someone and explain my work, its intention, its success (or lack of) in a show. Now, in effect, I can. You can call up the show anytime you like, read about it, see the work in its proper sequence, the work glowing and lit from behind on a high quality screen and then research it, hear about it from the artist that made it.  In your freaking living room! Tell me that's not new. 

Thompson Spring holds a strong place in my oeuvre, mature work leaning on past bodies created earlier. I wasn't in new territory here, just new content. 

Hope you like. 

No, I haven't lost a loved one to Covid 19, although I know some of you have, and I am apologetic about citing my loss at this time of such incredible human pain and suffering. So, my apologies at the outset.

My loss is of some work that is leaving the fold of being in my ownership and possession for the past 21 years. This coming Friday Maru and I will take three bodies of work to the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, MA to be added to their permanent collection.

I  am giving the Gallery two selections from larger portfolios: 6 Paradise CA prints 

and 4 aerial Potash Evaporation Pool pictures from Salt Lake, Utah.

Both of those are digital capture and inkjet prints, meaning I can make new prints easily if needed.

But the third group of photographs are something else entirely. They are a loss for I am giving them to the Addison, original analog prints of images I made in 1999 of some unique rock formations and petroglyphs in Bluff, Utah. There are 17 photographs in the set and there are no other prints if this work in existence.

This must be what a painter or sculptor feels when parting with an original piece. I have friends that do this all the time and they cite that along with the loss comes the sensation of being freed from the weight of something made in the past. I hope so as I am having a hard time letting go of these.

I wrote a post about this work a few years ago: 

https://nealrantoul.com/posts/bluff-utah

Why would I want to give away my art? What possible purpose could it serve to let it go, to donate my work to museums? Another way to think about this is what possible reason is there to hang onto it? Better for works of mine to be in a permanent collection in a climate controlled environment than in a flat file case in my studio. Yes, we are speaking of a legacy. In this case mine. 

Why the Addison? I showed my work several times there, the first time  in 1978! Also, there is older work of mine in their collection from 1982, so this is a chance to update what they have. Finally, the Addison Gallery is a wonderful museum with a rich collection and a long history of featuring photography. Right now they have one of the only sets of prints from Robert Franks' "The Americans" on display.

Additionally, there is this. There is freedom in no longer being encumbered with your artistic past. What you did then that is now gone means no baggage in future efforts. And yes, no less important, you have now externalized your work, put it out there in the world along other works from your colleagues and peers, from a community of artists. That feels good to me. No longer will good work be hidden away. And Bluff is good work.

Long ago, I had this thought that when I got old, I would spend much of my time still alive on work I had made already, hoping that museums and collections might be interested in collecting my photographs. That has come to pass, thank goodness. What an honor to find that museums are interested in having my work. Yes, of course, it would be great to find that they would purchase work, but that is not happening, for whatever reason. So be it. Not to say that in the future my work will remain a freebie. But for now, it is fine.

Last thought in this somewhat loaded post. It is not enough to make the work. Yes, that is crucial, but you need to nurture it, to massage it so that it is the best it can be. Then shepherd and manage it to see that it is respected, valued, and placed with an eye to its longevity.

Maybe someday you can go to the Addison and see some of my work from the collection.

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Continuing and finishing a look at the Salton Sea 2 series made in 2012. 

The Salton Sea, a simply incredible place, as if from another planet. The soil crunching under my feet and turning to powder at my step.

The "sun behind the pole" trick used here with some slight band of color where there's water in the background.

The first photograph in the series with a preponderance of color, some kind of fetid and polluted pond that stunk. The lens is now taking a larger role here. Push a wide angle lens down and verticals bow out.

Back to our original structural device... long, blacked-out rectangular windows and here just a hint of the pond through the building, in color. This is one of those where the actual the print (at 22 inches across) makes a huge difference. Everything is probably too small here to see the subtlety.

Moving on we turn to the right and find another expanse of what looks like devastation:

and 180 degrees:

showing the mountains in the far distance.

This photograph brings us to another abandoned structure, shot square onto the   pointed edge of the building, a clear divergence from all the others which were made as parallel plane photographs. Another pond coming up, seen through the window, is shown full frame next.

I think of this image as being the most brutal, as this pond filled with some unimaginable liquid that looks viscous, fills the frame.

Then next to the series only vertical, back to where we started from

Then to the last two images in the series, when exhibited put side by side to each other, the same file printed twice:

with the black and white image conforming to the rule that says water is color, over there on the far right of the frame, a judgement call on my part and not without controversy as some feel the print should be all black and white.

I didn't so much mind breaking my own convention as I wanted to try to prove the efficacy of the device I used. 

By showing these two in this way I wanted to present the series as yes, from the otherworldy Salton Sea and its altered reality but also to drive the point home that I was using this work as a vehicle to make a statement about contemporary photography and how the rules ordering the use of color and black and white are no longer in effect. Photography has advanced in maturity to a "no rules" system where anything goes, much as all art has. So much of present-day photography either ignores precedent or its maker is unaware of what was made before or doesn't care.

On a more personal level, although often thought of as a conventional landscape photographer, I am not. In this case, I sought to use this place as a canvas. My palette is black and white and color. I've chosen to make my painting."Take em or make em", we say. Let your photographs come out the way the tools and technology choose or impose your own ideas and construct in your work.  Salton Sea is not a conventional landscape series of photographs for I am using where I was as a vehicle or platform for what I chose to do to it. 

The last of an analysis of some pictures I made in Utah in 2010.

Know the music of Sufjan Stevens? It is wonderful. He's probably some kind of genius. At any rate, I often thought that he had difficulty with the ending of his songs. I sympathize as the endings of my series are difficult for me too.

Let's see what you think. 

We have, in effect, looped back to an earlier place, the barn seen in #11. The sun is flooding in to the inside of the structure, implying  no door door at the left end of the barn. This is another oblique angle photograph just as the first barn picture was.

Yes, we're reviewing some of the discoveries from earlier in the series, in this one, the motel. The open and black hole of the door is key here.

These photographs as we draw to a close are recapitulations.

• Recapitulation (music), a section of musical sonata form where the exposition is repeated in an altered form and the development is concluded*

*Source: Wikepedia

Here we are referring to frames #5,#6 and #7, the same side of the house we saw earlier, here moved in tighter to allow closer study, just we did with frames #13 and #14

And last,

this is the back of the earlier house and, for the first time, a photograph looking the other way showing what has been behind us for most of the others. In effect here we've retraced our initial progression, but now from behind. 180 degree turns loom large in my series work. And we've revisited some of the key sites seen earlier, but shown a different perspective on them. Why this one as the finish to the series? Because it contains both the reference to the earlier frames from the house in the series and that it faces the other way. And finally, this last photograph also shows us a blank face, with an off center dark hole of an open door on the left, probably evoking more questions than answers. I am okay with that. I wonder if you are. 

Thus ends the Thompson Spring series. My own summary of this work places it in a "mature" period, in both execution and concept, meaning that in earlier digital days there were quality issues. This is no longer true. What was captured nine years ago holds up well in comparison to the files I am creating now.  Conceptually, the Thompson Spring series fits in the mainstream catalog of works to date as opposed to being anomalous (of which there are many). If you work long and hard over a career at something, what you have done will reside as a hierarchy. For me, Thompson Spring lives in the "A List"of series works. They have not been shown or published. So it goes.

It has been a real pleasure to bring these five short essays to the blog and therefore to you. I am grateful for your readership and numerous comments. Two things: please subscribe to the blog (and confirm when you get an email ), and secondly you can always reach me at: Neals email