A Few Things
A few thoughts as we slide along these dog days of summer in mid-August in the year 2023
I am headed out west next week, flying to Spokane to spend a week or so centered in Colfax, WA which is wheat field central. Not sure but I think this is my 22nd trip. Concerning is the report that the air is smokey from the fires in Canada. I hope this will blow out by the time I get there.
A friend asked if I will do aerials. This was my answer:
My original answer was: no. But listening to myself tell the rationale of not shooting aerials this trip sounded like bull shit as I thought more about it. I have to send the gyro ahead as it weighs too much to go with me on the flight. It goes out to my hotel tomorrow UPS. So, yes, will do at least one flight.
I need a change of scenery and I am embarrassed to admit I have not been on a plane since before Covid. It is time.
This many times, photographing the extensive wheat fields in the southeastern corner of Washington, I will practice one of Neal's favorite truths:"the same but different" meaning I hope to bring something fresh to very familiar places.
And here in no particular order, some thoughts in passing:
The life of a landscape photographer. With the wheat, it is back in some dirt and dusty farm road with not a soul around, maybe a hawk on the hunt. Hour after hour and day after day. It is a little relentless and after a week I am over it. I used to go for longer times: 12 days or 2 weeks. It is too long. I run out of steam and want nothing to do with wheat fields for a while.
And another:
I certainly know I photograph less(at this age). My pace is less frenetic. I am very critical of the pictures I make these days and I find most work of mine boring. When I make a picture that I like it is because it is simple and clean and uncontrived. “Honest” is an objective. They are few. And far between.
And the last:
To be truthful this bothers me less than you might think. For I have much more work in my past than in my future and, while there is some that I cannot bear to look at there is some that I can. This August has seemed endless, days of work in the studio, curator visits to prepare for, mowing my two yards, a back yard and a front yard, biking (meaning exploring) working on the house scraping and painting and outright contentment at where I find myself. This is presumably what age can give us, days of few appointments, no meetings and few deadlines. For instance, I like to hang out with our two dogs. It isn’t that photography means less to me it is that most work I see holds little interest. Joni Mitchell sang that “the old hate the young”. I don’t particularly hate the young I am just frustrated by their lack of knowledge of history.
Wishing you all well. I will try to write here as I work in the wheat fields of the Palouse one more time.
Related series
WHEAT 2019
Gallery of photographs made in June 2019 and posted on the site the end of August 2019.
I have been photographing in the wheat growing region of SE Washington called the Palouse for 25 years.
Prints are 25 x 17 inches and may be seen by appointment through Insight Arts Manangement. Ask for Maru at:
(978) 496-4901 or m.rantoul@gmail.com
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 2014 Function
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 aerial 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
