I don't know quite what this is. This compulsion to photograph human beings in representational form. Cabelas had some, Mutter Museum yes, in dissected form, Reggio Emilia, yes, and certainly the Monsters work. And now Mannequins also. The latest content for me is in a few banners on Liberty Island in New York,  that depict what a new Museum under construction near the Statue of Liberty will look like.

At any rate: to the photographs.

This shown to establish where we are. The Museum under construction, and one of three banners to publicize it. This is what I did:

You can see that things dissemble pretty quickly, as these are just inserted into the file, the same as fake trees or vehicles are imposed into architectural renderings.

Although distant history, preserved as a jpeg, presumably these started out as actual people. Model releases obtained? In the public domain? No idea.

What can you infer about us in our present-day society from these pictures? Just the other night I saw the film 12 Strong. While watching the film I found myself thinking that CGI is now so good that we no longer can tell where actual footage depicting actors on location ends and computer-aided imagery begins. These figures on the banner at Liberty Island are a lot cruder but still where does that woman with the bag over her shoulder exist? What is her story and where is she now? What a remarkably dehumanizing thing to do, to pluck these people out of their lives and place them in a banner like this in an architectural rendering.

Liberty Island, New York Harbor.

I spent last week in NYC. The first post(here) looked at riding from Boston and back on the Acela train to Penn Station. In this post we'll take look at what I did while in New York.

Although the museums were wonderful, seeing the Stephen Shore show at MOMA and going to the Whitney (which I hadn't been to since it moved), I was on a mission to find some material for a new project. This was research. I ended up in the  Garment District and was often refused permission to photograph. But I made some important connections so have enough leads to be able to go back in March and do some actual photographing.  I also saw my former student Jon Sneden who is very dialed into the fashion world in NY. He lives in Austin, TX now but was back east for a show and said, when I asked him if he'd be able to help me with the mannequins project, "Of course, let me do something for you for a change". Enough said.

At any rate, being a photographer, I photographed.

Mannequins, mostly, although the middle one is a wig form in styrofoam. This probably stems from the Monsters work (here) I did a few years ago, but mannequins are the current passion. I am learning as I  go along. I leave next week for California to photograph in a used mannequin warehouse in Oakland. More to come on this soon. 

To finish up New York, the next day I took the ferry to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. It was brutally cold and windy, with a cloudless bright blue sky.... but gorgeous.

I know, these are just a few snapshots from my time there. I found Ellis challenging and look forward to going back to work it some more.

And the Great Lady herself:

Did I make any pictures that I would deem worthy of calling "work"? Maybe. Stay tuned.

I love New York.

Let's move up into more recent times. Since I finished teaching in Venice I've been to Italy a few times: 2009, 2012, 2014. The 2009 trip was photo specific and produced some wonderful work.

In 2012 I was able to get back to the area around Latisana not far from Trieste to photograph stands of trees. The trees are grown as a crop and are for making wood pulp.

And in 2014 on a trip to both France for  Paris Photo and to Italy I made pictures in Noli, along the Italian Mediterranean

This ends the series of several posts on my time teaching and photographing in Italy. There is far more than I've represented here. I linked a few series at the bottom of this post. Very often series represented in the gallery page on the site are backed up with blogs about the same series. Easy, just go to the search function in the blog and type in the series and a list of posts will populate on the left side of the page.

Thanks for following along. 

Finally, I feel blessed to have had so many opportunities to photograph in such an incredible country as Italy for so many years. I am the beneficiary of its warmth, its wonderful people, and its beauty.

After 911 things changed for many photographers. Working in a large format in Europe became much more difficult for Americans. There were some tense times att eh airport. Security would invariably want to get inside my 25 sheet 8 x 10 film boxes. They would say "open that". This seldom went well. 

Worse, even if I did get to Italy with my film intact, I ran the risk of having exposed film inspected and ruined on the way back!

Digital changed all that. By 2005 I was beginning to photograph digitally and was teaching in Venice in a new program I designed of a study abroad for Northeastern University students. 

Many students, total chaos and a great time. And heavy stress. What if I lost a student? What if a student got pregnant?  I photographed digitally in color those summers in Venice. 

This was a frustrating time, as putting in major effort wasn't resulting in pictures that I felt I could do much with. File sizes were small and so large prints weren't possible, at least in any real quality. This became a self-fulfilling prophecy: my work wasn't that strong because I didn't fully commit because I knew the quality wasn't going to be very high.

This one, above, is from 2005 and was the last year I worked in film, from a series called Vignole, a small island in Venice's lagoon that is mostly agricultural and not tourism-based. The prints were made by scanning the negatives and making inkjet prints. This image shows a marked difference in terms of investment, I think.

By 2009  I was fully committed to working digitally and had switched to using a full frame sensor. That year I was on a sabbatical leave and spent the fall living in Italy, retracing steps made earlier while teaching in the 90's.

1992 in 8 x 10

2009

I made comparative photographs that spanned 15 years or so.

2009

1993

Now I was using photography differently but also using Italy differently. No longer satisfied with just a single frame to speak about a place but working to compare two different times and visual sensibilities. This way of working meant that I was searching in 2009 for the same places I'd photographed in the 90's.

1991

2009

For this one in Trieste, I drove through this large city for hours to find the same place I'd photographed in 1991.

Next up? Italy 3

Since my last notice on this show coming up at the New England School of Photography in its new digs in Waltham in January the content of the exhibition has changed somewhat. The show is now called Neal Rantoul: Iceland and is work from this past summer's time teaching.

After a one week workshop in Iceland at the Baer Art Center finished in early August we left Hofsos in a rented car and drove the Ring Road for most of its route east and then south back to Reykjavik. I made photographs along the way. Those, with several from the cliff face at The Cape comprise the show.  This is an exhibition of my landscape photographs.

Here are a few from the show:

I am so excited to be able to bring this work to you. We are staying with a mostly consistent size for the photographs shown: framed at 46 by 34 inches.

Here are the details:

New England School of Photography

Neal Rantoul: Iceland

The Garner Center for Photographic Exhibitions

 274 Moody Street Waltham, MA 02453 

 Call for open hours: 617-438-1897

January 8-February 9, 2018 

Reception Tuesday, January 16, 6-7:30 pm 

Artist Talk Friday, January 19, 1:30 pm

Please come to the reception January 16. I look forward to seeing you there.