Many of you that read this blog are photographers. And many of you find (I hope) relevance in what I write in relation to your own work. My intention is to share with you experiences and photographs made throughout my career to, yes, increase awareness about my own work, but also to mentor and to teach, if possible. After all, I taught photography for my whole career, some 42 years.

In that vein, let us try to go down a particular path. But first some restrictions. First of all, I am talking about photography made primarily outdoors in the world. Landscape or city, things placed or working spacially, close or far, analog or digital, black and white or color... doesn't matter. Secondly, this is mostly a "thought thing", a conceptual precept based upon an idea that you would carry with you as you make pictures. Not a post production analysis or critical review. Okay? Ground rules established.

My point is this: The picture is what you make it to be. Wait a minute! Has Rantoul lost it? This is such an obvious thing to say that it evokes the classic "duh" response.This is so simple as to be practically imbecilic. But let's look at it a little to see if it makes any sense. Standing in front of something with a camera hand held or on a tripod I've got an infinite number of choices to make about how the picture will be. We do this all the time. I want this in the frame, over there on the edge. I want this to be prominent and in focus. I want this to be darker or lighter. Easy, we're smart and it comes almost naturally, for the most part, if we are a practiced photographer, comfortable with the tool we use and out in the world doing this frequently. But think about it for a second. Those choices, those decisions we make almost intuitively lie at the very core of what we are or try to be as an artist. And, more importantly, they can be changed and modified if we hang onto one very important realization. Photography doesn't give a shit about reality. There, I said it. We know this, of course, but photography is really slippery because it will render things pretty much like what they looked like when standing in front of a subject, all on its own. Actually, that's what most photographs made by amateurs are like. 

But shift gears here, please. Work with this fact: The picture is what you make it to be. You are the driver and it takes a very assertive person to make the picture exactly the way you want it to be. You will need to take control over your picture. Cartier-Bresson, Mr. Decisive Moment, would declare that he was like a dancer with a camera; waiting, moving, following, pouncing, running up the stairs, moving back, moving forward. Yes, photography can be sitting there forever waiting for the light to be right but mark my words, it is not a passive activity. There is a predatory quality to making pictures that is required. I believe.

There is another characteristic that comes into play when thinking about "the picture is what you make it to be". And that is the concept of placement, meaning where things are put or arranged in the frame. The choice you make about inclusion or exclusion in your pictures. Critical stuff. Keep it simple, keep it known and a clear decision: I want this there. I don't want this in the frame. Think I am only talking about landscape work? I am not. Take a look at this miracle:

by Garry Winogrand. Standing on the sidewalk, pointing right into the light with shadows creating multiple V's, a clear decision made in a split second. That was Winogrand's genius, the sheer speed at which his brain worked and connected to the shutter button of his camera. Amazing.

We all waffle, equivocate, are unsure about an outcome, have our bad days, get influenced by something useless or that takes us off track. Me and you, we all compromise, hoping, thinking maybe this will work out or be great even though we know it won't. Think about it. How often have you made your best work when in such an indefinite state of mind, unsure of your next step? What is better: to be emphatic and sure or to be ambivalent and indecisive? You are the king of placement, actually. For you know that to move three inches to the right changes everything. You know that to move closer three inches changes everything. Often these differences seem very subtle. But you are the one who has this control, this phenomenal power to bend the outcome of a picture to your will. For you are the driver. Remember this, as though I haven't written it often enough: The picture is what you make it to be.

Thanks for reading my blog.

Lying there in a field, thrown away, reminding me of Richard Misrach's dead animals thrown into a pit in Nevada under very suspicious circumstances. The series, called "Desert Cantos" starts off this way:

On March 24, 1953, the Bulloch brothers were trailing 2000 head of sheep across the Sand Springs Valley when they were exposed to extensive fallout from a dirty atomic test. Within a week first ewes began dropping their lambs prematurely– stunted, woolless, legless, potbellied. Soon full-grown sheep started dying in large numbers with the same symptoms — running sores with large pustules, and hardened hooves. Horses and cattle were found dead with beta burns. At final count, 4,390 animals were killed.

photograph by Richard Misrach

To be clear, Misrach offers no answers but uses these pictures to analogize about the atomic bomb testing the US did in this area in the 50's and 60's. Miscrach made his pictures in 1987.

The question occurs to me that I probably couldn't have or wouldn't have made these pictures of uprooted evergreens in a North Carolina tree farm if it hadn't been for Misrach's pictures serving as precedent.

I know, they are only trees, right? There is no real tragedy here. Or is there?

Think about this. I made these late one morning with a gentle rain falling in rural North Carolina in March 2015. We stopped, realizing what we were about to drive right past. Out in a field, uprooted, chopped down and left there what, to be fed into a chipper or buried like Misrach's corpses? What a waste. Sad, really.

Grown to be sold to be a centerpiece in a family's homage to Jesus Christ's birth on December 25th? Or, depending on your point of view, to be cut, bought, brought inside, covered in plastic lights, draped with fake snow and tinsel with gifts from Walmart strewn around its base to be ripped open by children in a feeding frenzy on Christmas morning. Hard sometimes not to be cynical.

I'd like to bend this work and the idea of life cut short into a piece about how our contemporary times ruin everything. How we live in a disposable society and throw what we don't want away. But it's just isn't true. This particular carnage of some evergreens in North Carolina isn't about "now" and the cheapness of things in 2015. For it is universal, isn't it? There is nothing particularly timely about these pictures. We've been ruining things since mankind started.

At any rate, I wrote this pessimistic view last week when it was rainy and cold and New England was relentlessly hanging on to winter. By Saturday the sun had broken out, the temperature was higher and I spent all day at the Griffin Museum mentoring photographers and looking at some very fine work that affirmed my point of view that there is good in humanity after all. 

It didn't hurt that I had beer and a burger that night with Frances and Paula from the Griffin. We told stories and laughed and life was good again.

Can you take a break from your very busy day that is filled with things you just have to do, the deadlines you must meet, the commitments you must keep? I invite you to do just that here with this blog right now.

In Providence, RI a few nights ago. A Philip Glass concert. Just Glass playing a  gorgeous sounding Steinway Grand in several solo pieces and then some duets with a young virtuoso violinist named Tim Fain. A most wonderful experience. Ah music. So important. For you too, I bet.

A blurry picture of the Steinway piano Philip Glass played in Providence.

Music has been crucial to me my whole life. Music can save you, perhaps like a religion or faith. I am not religious but I am grateful for the incredible music in my life as I believe it has helped pull me through some seriously tough times. I would not call myself a musician but I have been a piano/keyboard player since I was about 8. I play, I improvise and I compose.  I record too but what I play is mostly not made to share with others. For someone like me who always wants to be the best at everything I do, it is comforting to have something that I do where I am definitely not as good as I want to be and never will be. I like to think that in my next life, if there is one, I will be a musician.

Music has been one of the larger influencers and informers of my life as a visual artist. Different music for different periods, of course. So what music? Short question, big answer. Earlier days as a young artist: Keith Jarrett solo piano, principally the Koln and Bremen concerts, Joni Mitchell, the Fauré Requiem, any Bach, but specifically St. Mathew's Passion and the Goldberg Variations, Stravinsky, Dvorak chamber pieces, Brahms, Sibelius, Jean-Luc Ponty, Mozart Requiem, The Story,  Laurie Anderson, all Steve Reich but particularly Music for Eighteen Musicians, Philip Glass, Aaron Copland. Later: early career Pat Metheny, the ECM artists such as Ralph Towner, Jan Garbarek, Jarrett as a jazz musician, John McLaughlin, the solo pianist and composer Philip Aaberg, Beth Orton, Notwist, early Radiohead, Fiona Apple, Mindy Smith, Sufjan Stevens, Tori Amos, Arvo Paart, Gustav Mahler, Haushka, the Beethoven symphonies, and on and on and on. I have left out many more than I have included.

The ceiling at the Veteran's Auditorium in Providence

If you are old enough to remember before CD's when there was vinyl you also remember that listening to music was different then. We listened, we devoted our- selves to really listening. Now it seems like music is folded into our lives. I listen to music with more dedication and concentration on road trips while driving than I do at home or in the studio. I do not usually listen to music while I am photographing, although sometimes when I am out in the wheat fields, off by myself, I will keep the headphones on. I see two sides here. When we would sit and listen, using the best equipment we could afford, we heard everything or tried to. If the recording was from a performance, we worked at finding the best reading, the best interpretation and we listened for differences. Now, I listen less critically but music is folded into my life more, there when I work out, or drive someplace, or perhaps when working on digital files and making prints.

From the late 80's until about 2003 my darkroom was a separate room in the main lab at Northeastern where I taught. Most of those years I was working in 8 x 10 and the amount of labor required was positively ludicrous. I would print often on weekends, arriving early before the lab was opened by work study students or maybe a former student or volunteer. Behind my closed door, I would crank the music and as the day wore on students working in the gang darkrooms could hear me in there. I had a sign on the closed door to my darkroom that said, "If I am here, I am not available. If I am not here feel free to ask all the questions you like." Sometimes in class students would ask me what I had been listening to last weekend. One of my favorite students during those years was majoring in architecture and engineering. He was quite intense, brilliant,  and the son of a very highly regarded chemistry professor at school. I could always tell how our conversation was going to go as he began with the question, "What are you listening to, Neal?" If I answered with something light we could talk about inconsequential things, but if I answered something like Schoenberg or Messiaen I knew we were going to go deep.

Ah music. So important. For you too, I bet.

Forgive me for asking, but do you have a plan? If I know my readers' demographic I predict you make pictures, aspire to make pictures or just plain love pictures. A few of you that read me might be former students. But really, do you have a plan? Why have I asked the same question three times already? Because you should. Doesn't matter: early career, late career. No difference. Not just in photo or making art, by the way. You should have a plan for your life. An objective, something you want to make happen before the lights go out. You know, aspire towards something? 

Goldfield Ghost Town, Arizona 2013

Take your pictures, for instance. Want them shown? How do you go about getting them shown? And at what level. The one person show at the Met in NYC? Or the bar down the street? Want sales? Want a gallery to show you and represent you? How do you think that works? Want to publish your work? Want someone else to publish your work? How about a plan? I wonder if you're so caught up in the day to day part of your busy life that you don't dream that much. Sometimes just putting one foot in front of the other seems like plenty for any given day. One day at a time. 

Let's stop here for an instant. I am not trying to be antagonistic or for this post to be a baiting tactic but this is what separates the amateur from the professional.  The pro makes his/her art as a discipline. The amateur fits it in there and waits for "inspiration". The pro usually doesn't wait for inspiration so much. The pro relies upon a constant output of creativity that is innate to his/her very being.

What do you do with a young creative genius or a child prodigy? You work them. You don't coddle them or treat them as special with their "gift". They learn discipline and focus and an "off the charts" work ethic. As an aside,  one of my early lessons  was in the late 70's when I started teaching at Harvard.  It didn't take long to figure out that most of my students were smarter than I was. Of course, I knew things they didn't. Over thirty years later in the years before before I retired from teaching, students were surprised at my accessibility and humility. It was because of those early years at Harvard and a lesson well learned. I think it's why I tried to treat students with respect throughout my career.

Back to having a plan. Beyond the immediate objective, beyond whatever is right around the corner, what's the idea? Where do you want to get to? Simple enough. Clarity is good. The plan could be to lounge at the beach in the Exumas for all I care but chances are it won't work out unless you make it an objective. 

Look. Art is hard. (I know I know: there are skeptics among you). It pulls from within and in order to sustain it the well must be deep. By about 24 years old I had found what it was that I would do. From then to now and beyond my job is to do what I do. My plan? It is to make work over all else. Yes there are and were things like a job, relationships, a kid, bills to pay, other career ladders to climb. But what ran constant was the work that I make. Still is.

What is your plan?

I wish you the very best with whatever your plan may be.

Railing. As in: "railing against".

This one's really going to get me in trouble but I simply can't take it anymore. I am talking about on-line photo contests. This one is in the current issue of PDN (March 2015 pg. 26) asking for submissions to the "Curator Awards". The grand prize winner gets $3500 and winners will be published in the July issue of the magazine.

Take a look at the submission page:

$45 a pop for a single image? Or even $45 for up to six in a series? Seems a little steep, doesn't it? Let's break this down. This is a magazine you pay to read, and note the contest has sponsors. Makes you wonder what they're sponsoring if not the contest. On top of that, you are being charged to submit. Let's be clear: this is a  magazine charging you to create content for itself in the July issue. Doesn't magazine content usually mean that there is a photographer being paid for his/her work? In effect, you are paying for the chance that you might get published and the vast majority of applicants will get nothing at all. Even if you did get published, there will be no exhibition of the winning work. Something is very twisted with this picture.

Don't get me wrong. I like PDN and subscribe to it for its news about the industry and trends in content and also reviews of new gear. But submit to a contest like this? I don't think so.

PDN is not alone in this practice but watch out. Say you did submit and did get published in the July issue, it would be unlikely as the sole winner, probably as a runner up. What would one picture printed as a thumbnail get you for your submission of $45, or $90 or more? I don't think it would do much for your career.  Do I sound cynical? You bet.

Paula Tognarelli, the director of the Griffin Museum of Photography nearby in Winchester, MA just wrote in Facebook how she judged a contest recently,  selected the winners and then the organization she judged for changed the winners. 

As photography gets bigger there is more of this now.  Like I said: watch out.