Several years ago I wrote a piece about sitting in my home in Cambridge in early December working on picture files as the season's first snow began.

The essay formed the foundation for a book we made called: Trees, Sand and Snow

Well, it is now early December and the forecast is predicting a rapid drop from the upper 50's tonight to big wind and freezing temperatures with the possibility of flurries tonight.

In the book, each of the three chapters is preceded by a one-page piece that is my effort to tie these three separate bodies of work together using time as the overriding principle. This is my essay for the third chapter called Snow:

I was a little shaken by the power of the two groups of pictures I’d made on Martha’s Vineyard that day. When back home in Cambridge, a few hours away from the island, I did what I have done so many times before. I worked the files. This simply means getting the pictures I made into the computer, working on them with a few types of software and printing them. The room I do this on at my home looks out on my condo’s tiny back yard and over a fence into my neighbor‘s, which is larger. One afternoon a few days before Christmas, as I was working on the photographs I’d shot from Squibnocket, I looked up from the computer monitor to see that it was snowing. This was the first snow of the season and, as it was cold, it was coming down in small light flakes.

I always love the first snow in New England, the clean smell of the air, the quiet it brings. As the snow started to stick and accumulate I started thinking about where I might go photograph that afternoon. I am still in a place where I am so appreciative of having this freedom to just get the camera and go whenever I want. I’ve been retired from teaching for 5 years. At any rate, I headed just a mile or so away to the City of Cambridge’s skate park, a new park for the city and built under the elevated Rt 93 as it comes down into Boston, across the river. I’d been photographing the park for some time, both with people using it and not. I knew this day with the snow sticking no one would be there.
I arrived and the snow was slowly building up to cover everything and make the form, steps, ramps and curves disappear under its blanket. But not yet.
I started to work, much in the way I had photographed the laid bare sand at Squibnocket two weeks before. Just as I did then, I photographed the overall and then moved in to look at the small. Here I had to be careful and plan my approach so as to not find my footprints in my pictures. Pristine and pure, the skate park was becoming increasingly obscured by the snow falling. Time again played a part in the making of these pictures, the contrast of the exposed beach being covered over by the rising sea and the skate park disappearing under the blanket of snow. Just as the ocean had receded to show the sand below the snow was drifting down from above to cover the skate park that afternoon in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Time is a big concept in photography because often we freeze it in a fraction of a second to stop time and motion or spread it over a period of seconds or minutes to blur or make our pictures spread through time.
•••
In conclusion, these three chapters called Trees, Sand & Snow exist due to time’s prevailing place in all things we do in this life on this planet. Reaching 70 years old, looking back at my career as a teacher, an artist and a father, the pictures I made on Martha’s Vineyard and Cambridge stand for me as symbols of, quite simply, the character of time through life.

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We are working on a new book. Most likely it will be called Paradise and it will be a monograph of my photographs from the town of Paradise, California made after the 2018 wildfires. 

I made two trips to Paradise in 2019 to photograph.

The design is by the incredible Andrea Greitzer, which, if you've followed the blog for a while, you know is the designer for so many of my books.

I am writing the intro and I am in negotiation with a journalist to write the foreword. She has been writing about the phenomena of wildfires throughout the state of California for the past several years.

The book will be unusual as it is this career artist's photographic response and interpretation to the tragedy of a whole town decimated by fire.  Our world is   changing, shifting and transforming into a different place than we grew up in. Climate change is causing longer lasting and more severe droughts, severe floods and huge winds fanning flames into walls of fire; all these are making parts of California, as well as Australia and other locations, dangerous places to live and a forecaster of more wide spread damage to come. 

The book will be another print-on-demand book and will be published in an extremely limited first edition, i.e. 100 copies. It won't be large and it won't be expensive as we are using this first run as a dummy to show to publishers for wider distribution.

Want one? Contact us and we will put you on our list. This will be an Insight Arts Management(IAM) book. You can sign up here( IAM Email) to be on our notify list. We plan on publishing by late spring/early summer 2020.

Final Reminder and coming up this weekend:

As always, thank you for reading the blog.

I am very pleased announce that a new book of my photographs is just out (December 2017). Called Trees, Sand & Snow (TS&S) it builds a rational around the idea of  "connection" by linking three separate series of photographs into chapters. These are accompanied with short essays authored by me.

The book is photographs I made a year ago; two bodies of work from Martha's Vineyard and one from a skate park photographed during a snowstorm in Cambridge, MA where I live.

Trees

Sand

Snow

Sometimes the planets align. This is the first time in my career that I've connected specific series to each other to draw analogies and to make a larger whole. The process has been tremendously challenging and rewarding.

I arrived at the idea for the book a couple of weeks after I turned 70. This book is my first that leans heavily on my writing. Since starting the blog several years ago I've worked at become a better writer. Each chapter in TS&S starts with a short essay about the premise of the work and my belief that photographs can connect in both obvious as well as subtle and profound ways.  My  hope being that this would promote readers looking at other works of mine to seek similar connections and then perhaps lead to a deeper understanding of photographic essays in general. 

TS&S is 61 pages, 9.5 x 8 inches, in soft cover and elegantly designed by Andrea Star Greitzer. 

We have printed the new book in limited numbers and I will fulfill orders and ship books myself. Please email me directly if you'd like one (nrantoul@comcast.net). I will sign each book. They are $36 each, plus shipping.

The book Portland is now out. This is the 4th in the series of small books that  highlight my series works from the 80's and 90's.

These are available by emailing me directly (nrantoul@comcast.net) or they will be for sale at the Griffin Museum of Photography. Portland is also on the website: here.

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.