I am sending this out on the eve of a potentially historic snowstorm in New England in late January 2015.

I know, we're not anywhere close to spring but my ex wife's father (my ex father-in-law?) always claimed he could sense spring coming in January. And I can too if I've got paper white narcissus bulbs blooming at home. That smell they make is a kind of perfume that says spring for me.

My mom used to grow them when my sisters and I were kids and the whole house would smell.  Some people hate it. Not me. They're easy to do and they brighten the day.

Curious about what two photographs are hiding behind the flowers above the table in my dining room at home?

They are of a bicycle and a wagon wheel in the almost dry riverbed of a tributary stream to the Connecticut River in Vermont taken last August on a kayaking trip. The prints are somewhat brown black and whites 37 x 25 inches in 45 x 34 inch white frames. Read the full story about the trip here. 

Skate Park, Santa Rosa, CA

So this blog is primarily about my work. There. I said it. Click and Clack the Good News Garage guys on NPR (although Tom is no longer with us) have a "Shameless Commerce" section of the show where they push their own stuff. I always think of that when I push my own stuff but this is important: Ever wonder what you would do as an artist if you had all the time you wanted, the wherewithal to go where you wanted and the ability to make all the work you wanted? Would this allow the floodgates of limitless creativity to open for you and would the world welcome this new output with open arms? Or would the well run dry? Below I share with you one person's account.

Read on dear reader, as I welcome you to my nightmare.

First of all, you could get complacent. Kick back, relax, put your feet up, languish on some tropical island and view the world through your Ray Bans. Although there certainly are times when I do just that, mostly I work.

2014 was a good year for making art as it turns out as I made a lot. Many of you know I retired  from teaching in 2012 and ever since have devoted most of my time to making pictures, with frequent travel to support the making of new pictures.

In 2014 I did this:

-Aerials, CA
-Before and After Aerials, CA
-Skate Parks, CA
-Tafoni, CA
-Function and Form, Wheat, WA
-Monsters, MA
-National Museum of Medicine and Health, MD
-Tom's Neck, Martha's Vineyard, MA
-South Woods Farm, Oak Bluffs, MA
-Connecticut River Trip NH/VT
-The Wall, Chelsea, MA
-Car Show, Martha's Vineyard, MA
-Waves, Martha's Vineyard, MA

In addition, as I spent a couple of weeks in Europe in the fall, there is work coming from there, but not yet finished.

California

Call me up, or contact 555 Gallery where I show my work, and ask to see any of these. They are printed and ready to look at. This means they are specific portfolios and range from 13 x 19 inch prints on up to 24 x 30's and larger.

What can I derive from all this work I make now that there is at least the perspective of looking back at it from early 2015? That there is good and bad news. To have this much work shot, made and finished is a good thing, definitely. It better be a good thing as I have worked long hours here. Work finished and sitting on a shelf means the freedom and ability to move on to new projects. I am proud of much of these photographs and my work has grown and deepened too over this past year.There is more written text that goes along with my work, not as an explainer so much but to set the emotional tone of the piece. I think this is the influence of writing this blog so often. I am more aware of writing in general too after co-teaching last spring at Penland with the author Chris Benfey. As a younger man I don't think I could formulate words to go with my work very well and there wasn't a vehicle for putting words out there the way there is now. With some exceptions I am working more symphonically, to use a musical analogy.  Therefore, I am making statements that are broader in scope, with analogies to things going on in the world, in the  environment, in art and with my own perceptions. I still have a sense of humor as I am not a total cynic. I still make smaller pieces too, shorter bodies of work that are of a place or a glimpse into something, not intended to be big and expansive.

The bad news is that this is simply too much from one person and too much for anyone to look at and to grasp, handle, curate or show, regardless of whether the work is good or not. Perhaps people need multiple visits to see it all. Good luck with that. Curators are busy people. This is an aside but BTW: This is years ago but a local curator made it his summer project to look at my work made over my career. Just about all of it. He was at the studio faithfully, a day a week, to look at photographs through the whole summer.  Even then there was too much work. At the end of the summer he had a good working knowledge of my work and was conversant on much of it.  One small problem. He died the following fall. I've always wondered if maybe I killed him. One idea is to put work into books... thin, modest, small books made on demand and designed to be available as a number of books, 30 or 40 maybe. We'll see.

Central Valley, CA

I had a museum curator to the gallery recently. She arrived at 11 am and left a little before 2.  She looked at work, we talked and had lunch. It was good. At the end she said, glassy eyed, "No, I'm fine. It really wasn't too much." Of  course it was. I was   tired of looking halfway through the time we had together and I made the freaking pictures! On the other hand, to her credit, this curator has looked at more work in the past few years than many throughout my career and she's still looking.  She's either a sucker for punishment or she sees something worth looking at. 

So, I say this with, believe me, all due humility, no inflated sense of self or ego. This is the way I work. It is not necessarily a good thing but people have to deal with it. An artist presumably wouldn't change his/her manner of working for the end game of sales off the gallery wall or the one person show at a prestigious museum. I have never made work with this kind of calculation. I have just made my pictures.

Part of the problem or good thing (depending on your view) is that I work in series. I   am a professional sequencer, shooting and editing my work to put pictures next to pictures.That makes for more pictures. So be it. Do I ever believe there are too many pictures in a given series? Oh yeah. Do I frequently go back in there and pull pictures out? No, I do not. For better or worse, series are usually done and finished when printed, sequenced and boxed. They are, for me, like a published book. Already printed.

Chelsea, MA

So, my friends, be careful what you wish for. Finally and perhaps more seriously, I would not change anything about my life right now; my work, my age, my income (well, more would be better. I could get the sports car I want and use it to go where I want to make, you guessed it... more pictures!), my relationships, my travels, my daily routines and rituals, all exist at a time when I still can do and am very actively doing.

Thanks for reading.

I now show my work at 555 Gallery in South Boston. Over the past year, the  gallery's owner, Susan Nalband, has shown my work twice and in 2015 we will show the Monsters work in September (don't know about this new work? Stay tuned).  I am extremely pleased to say I am one of the stable of artists showing at 555 Gallery.

What does that mean, to be on a list of represented artists at a gallery? Often it means that a contract has been signed by both the gallery and the artist that stipulates the terms of their working together. This can cover how much the gallery takes of a sale, the frequency of your work being shown, the definition of the region where representation is, terms of how framing, shipping and transportation costs are handled, the nature of limited editions, how sales are handled through other galleries, exclusivity and so on. For many this relationship looks like the gold at the end of the rainbow, a career objective reached. But a gallery cannot do everything. The gallery has to take care of all the other artists too. Let's take a look at another Boston photo gallery: Robert Klein Gallery. The gallery's list of artists shows 131 all told! This is like a supermarket of photographers with an almost infinite number of choices. What this means is that Klein gallery is  the "go to" gallery in Boston for A list artists, both alive and dead, from around the world. Want a Steiglitz for your new high end McMansion in the burbs? Who are you going to call: Robert Klein. Has he got it in stock? Absolutely not, but his search machine of contacts and the network he has is large and reaches everywhere. Susan at 555 Gallery has a much shorter list and, being a new gallery, that list is still developing. Robert Klein is the established gallery in the Boston area. 555 is the new upstart gallery, able to turn on a dime, show different photographs in different ways, show younger edgier work that pushes at photography's conventions a little while still carrying a few old farts like me. I am thankful to be along for the ride.

I wonder if Robert Klein's gallery was open New Year's Eve? 555 was with a party that, quite simply, rocked. I know. I was there. I even danced!

Susan has in one short year become one of the sought after gallery owners for portfolio reviews and judging competitions and has gained respect in the community for her considered and respectful critiques of artists' work.

While the space is not large it is perfectly set up for looking at work with strong and direct light, with plenty of room to move around and see the work both close up but also from some distance. You've probably heard of a gallery's "back room". The back room is where most sales take place and if a gallery doesn't have one it may not make many sales. 555 Gallery's is spacious and set up perfectly to discuss terms and to show work in portfolios from flat file cases. 

Susan has also shown some wonderful work since opening last January while at the same time has proven willing to learn from a few mistakes. Running an art gallery is not for the feint of heart as this is a high risk business. Susan is proving to possess the necessary toughness to survive combined with accessibility, approachability and enough humanity to be able to carry on a conversation with those experienced and inexperienced alike, a very rare attribute for a gallerist.

I wish her and my work well, of course. But feel I am in good hands with a gallery owner who is straightforward and friendly with all potential clients while being a strong advocate and agent for the artists she exhibits. If you haven't been, I urge you to go.

555 Gallery is located at:

555 East 2nd Street, Boston

857-496-7234

http://www.555gallery.com

Every year we see lists like this in December: "The Best of ..." This one is from the photo staff at the Boston Globe (here) and it is a wonderful and rich assortment of pictures from some of photojournalism's best, with the context provided by the photographers.

As I've been looking at these lists now for several years I can find a couple of trends and key points. One is that photography has improved so drastically that pictures like these are rich and full, with vibrant colors and that allow the photographer the ability to capture truly significant moments, sometimes with very long lenses, much better than ever before. The other is that many of these pictures are made by shoving right into the scene, meaning that photojournalists no longer seem compelled to be on the outside observing but are right inside whatever is happening. I am also struck by the consistency of using foreground to background information, of framing the pictures with something prevailing in the foreground. These pictures are made by professionals that know their craft and apply skills based upon hands on training over sometimes long careers.

Finally, this is photography displaying the richness and complexity of our human condition, almost without exception. Landscape? No. Architecture? No. Even the aerial of the jet plane crash evokes strong feelings of what lives were extinguished in a fraction of a second. 

My hat is off to all of them at the Globe. Thank you for another year of excellent photographs.

I've been back from Europe and Paris Photo a little less than a week and it is time to move into the festival and show what was there that I liked, and perhaps a few I didn't.

Note: I will attribute the works where I can.

Day one I spent walking endlessly around,  quickly overwhelmed by the sheer size and scale of the show. At one point I stopped, got an overpriced sandwich and sat on the steps and told myself to focus, Neal, make some sense out of this.

Overall impressions: Much good work. A great deal of work striving to be seen, noticed, purchased. Major parts of photography neglected, missed or not deemed worthy. At times, the back story was important, such as in David Graham's work:

Graham uses America as his canvas and is from England. Each photograph is a symbol of larger issues brought about by his research and his study of, well, us.

These are by local artist Nick Nixon of his wife's sisters over 40 years. Perhaps you saw the same work on view at the Boston Museum of Fine arts last year. I studied the interest in these. It was steady and people were really looking. These prints were larger than the MFA ones and were the centerpiece of what the gallery was showing. Sales? I saw no red dots but this could be just because the gallery chose not to show them. Would you buy just one of these? Buy one at time seeking to obtain all them?And then this issue of an artist being known for something he/she did as a sort of yearly sideline interests me. I am sure Nick has mixed feeling about this work. I wonder if he would have rather been represented at Paris Photo with some of his other work?

This marble quarry picture illustrates how things reappear.  Although quite lovely it certainly isn't anything new. I was doing these in 8 x 10 in the early nineties from marble quarries in northern Italy and Ed Burtansky practically established his  career with the ones he did of  the quarries in Barre, VT. This one's by Pannos Kokinas.

While some galleries showed very large pieces there were other efforts to show work that would impress from a distance such as this gallery showing grids of photographs.

Arno Minkkinen had a couple of very nice pieces:

Notice that when I took this the first day, the left smaller piece had sold and the larger more iconic image by Arno had not. Arno was there at the show.

This photograph seemed to be positioned to be seen as a blockbuster and it was impressive but also left me a little underwhelmed:

It probably was about 80 inches across.

Stephen Shore's work was there:

Looking solid and Richard Misrach, looking very unimpressive in small prints:

This got me thinking that perhaps the public's appetite for the new is voracious and galleries don't think that by showing established artists they will do as well. Maybe someone like Misrach is already represented everywhere.

I found these fascinating:

and

which weren't made so much by the photographer as "reassembled" using NASA pictures from satellite views of the Grand Canyon. They were a little cold feeling and by a German photographer.

You'd think these French gallery guys would want to engage with the public a little more:

And this was telling: older dude, presumably with the fat checkbook, there with his young lover or possibly daughter choosing which one they wanted to buy.

Finally, for this post, we'll finish with these which were a little bizarre but fun to look at and see how the artist worked:

They have the characteristic of an artist run amok with the cloning tool in Photoshop

The show for me? Overwhelming, frustrating, enjoyable, educational, informative,  helpful (as an artist), made me angry, made me laugh, made me proud to be a photographer, impressive, depressing. Go again? Absolutely. 

Next post will finish my review of Paris Photo 2014.